Poor old Pornhub. The UK’s most visited pornography site is having a barren August and not just because its (mostly male) users are on holiday with the family.
Following the introduction of new age verification rules, as part of the Online Safety Act – which requires users to prove how old they are by entering credit card details or using their bank account, mobile phone contract or facial recognition – traffic to Pornhub has almost halved.
In the fortnight between July 24 (the day before the new legislation came in) and August 8, visitors to the site fell by 47 per cent, according to data experts Similarweb. Other adult sites have also reported drops in UK traffic. OnlyFans is apparently down 10 per cent, but that could be down to having banned Bonnie Blue. No word yet on whether the amount of laundry being done in the middle of the night has fallen, too.
Let me be the first to say a tentative woohoo. I previously wrote in these pages how, ahead of the age verification kicking in, online forums had been flooded with men (and 73 per cent of UK porn users are male) angry that the trifling matter of keeping children safe was getting in the way of their unrestricted pleasure. Now? It seems possible that at least some of those chaps have cut themselves off. Sounds painful.
If the side effect of protecting society’s most vulnerable – the average age that children are thought to first view explicit porn in this country is just 13 – is that some men have had their own online habit broken? That’s surely something to celebrate.
University College London academics might say it can take between 18 to 255 days to form a new habit, but I bet their study didn’t take into account the prospect of having to put your real details into a porn site and the potential for data leaks.
I’ve interviewed porn-addicted men, who told me about the mindless scrolling, almost numb to what they were seeing, searching for ever darker material to get a kick. They wanted to stop but felt unable to tear themselves away – maybe the thought of having to enter their long card number was the breaker some have been waiting for.
Not unlike (indulge me) my friend whose unstoppable M&S fashion habit was cut off by the cyberattack the retailer experienced this summer and which denied her access to its website for several weeks.
Look, I’m not naive. I do realise that a lot of Pornhub’s users will now be using VPNs (Virtual Private Networks), which disguise the location of their IP address and were the most downloaded thing on the UK Apple App Store in the days after the new rules came in. That makes data on UK visits to porn sites hard to pin down.
Nor do we know exactly which users have stopped scrolling. Is it those accessing the most violent pornography day after day? Or the more casual viewer who doesn’t rely on porn enough to bother going through age checks – easier just to knock it on the head.
Still, I can’t help wondering whether these men might not come to thank the likes of Baroness Kidron, who campaigned tirelessly to get this legislation passed. She’s likened it to making children “climb out of the window”, rather than just giving them unrestricted access. If a few men are also reluctant to shimmy down the drainpipe? That’s surely progress, however angry they might be.
