LOS ANGELES—Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub.com and other adult platforms, accused the United Kingdom’s (UK) digital regulator of ineffective enforcement of the age verification requirements outlined under the Online Safety Act of 2023.
The Financial Times reported on Thursday that data tracked by the digital regulator, Ofcom, showed that about a third of all web traffic to pornography websites from IP addresses in the United Kingdom’s digital space fell off in the months following the official implementation of the controversial Online Safety Act this past summer.
Times reporter Daniel Thomas reported the claim, based on a review of recent monitoring data that Ofcom publicly releases for statutory and transparency purposes.
AVN has learned, including from Thomas’ reporting, that Aylo believes it has been comparatively marginalized, with a loss of legitimate and monetizable web traffic at a rate higher than one-third of overall traffic to all adult sites, according to documents shared with AVN by an Aylo spokesperson.
Traffic to the company’s sites dropped by over 77 percent in the United Kingdom, according to Thomas and the documents seen by AVN.
“Since the Act came into effect, Pornhub and other compliant platforms have observed a significant shift in user behavior,” one of the Aylo documents reads about Ofcom’s effectiveness in enforcing the Online Safety Act (OSA). “This is not a surprise. This pattern is consistent with trends seen in other jurisdictions.”
This is a standard talking point for Aylo when arguing against age verification, explicitly targeting content on age-restricted platforms. One such example Aylo uses is the case of the U.S. state of Louisiana being the very first to adopt age verification measures that specifically target pornography platforms.
“Similarly, since [the] implementation of the OSA, Pornhub has, again, lost nearly 80 percent of its U.K. traffic,” reads the same Aylo document.
“As always, people did not stop looking for porn,” adds the document. “They just migrated to other non-compliant sites that don’t ask users to verify age, that don’t follow the law, that don’t take user safety seriously, and that often don’t even moderate content.”
The Aylo document then attaches a graph visualizing the drop in web traffic, shown below:
“There are hundreds of thousands of adult sites accessible to global users,” Aylo added in a different document. “So far Ofcom has sent letters of notices of investigation into non-compliance to 69 sites and apps (representing less than 0.1 percent of accessible online destinations for pornographic content).”
The report by the Times also noted that representatives of Aylo recently met with members of His Majesty’s Government and Ofcom at high-level meetings. When asked about the meetings, the Aylo spokesperson declined to comment on private meetings with government officials.
“That said, we remain committed to and available for meeting with governments everywhere to share our data and discuss the most effective solution for age verification,” the spokesperson concluded via email.
AVN has reported on the various Ofcom non-compliance investigations. For example, the company that owns the controversial adult tube site Motherless.com is under investigation, as well as an array of companies that own tube sites, sites accused of hosting CSAM and stolen intellectual property, and AI platforms used for porn deepfakes.
Considering Aylo’s criticisms, it goes to show that the Pornhub ownership group is relishing a clear “we told you so” moment. At least, that is the observation of First Amendment attorney Lawrence Walters.
Walters commented, “It should be no surprise that the U.K. traffic to adult sites has dropped substantially, and now there is [official] statistical data to confirm that assumption. Adult users are naturally hesitant to sacrifice their privacy rights and share sensitive personal information as a condition of accessing legal adult content.
“Leaving aside the constitutional concerns with burdening access to adult speech by requiring users to disclose age and identity data, this legislative approach was short-sighted and impractical,” Walters noted in an email exchange with AVN.
Ofcom did not return AVN’s request for comment by the time of publication.
