The War on Porn Regular Updates about the Assault on The Adult Industry
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Something about this feels almost inevitable. You build walls, people find doors. You close the doors, they dig tunnels. The United Kingdom’s new Online Safety Act — the one meant to force adult sites to verify users’ ages — is supposed to keep minors out. But according to Aylo, the company behind Pornhub and a bunch of other major adult platforms, it’s working about as well as a “Do Not Enter” sign on a back alley at midnight.
They’re not just complaining for sport. Data tracked by Ofcom, the UK’s digital regulator, shows that roughly a third of all UK traffic to porn sites vanished in the months after the law kicked in. That sounds big — until you hear Aylo’s numbers. They’re claiming a 77 percent nosedive in visits from the UK alone. Think about that: nearly four out of five users gone, overnight.
“Since the Act came into effect, Pornhub and other compliant platforms have observed a significant shift in user behavior,” one Aylo document said. “This is not a surprise. This pattern is consistent with trends seen in other jurisdictions.”
Translation: they saw it coming. In places like Louisiana, which rolled out one of the first porn-specific age verification laws in the U.S., traffic didn’t disappear — it simply went elsewhere. “Similarly, since [the] implementation of the OSA, Pornhub has, again, lost nearly 80 percent of its U.K. traffic,” the document continues. “As always, people did not stop looking for porn. 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.”
It’s a harsh point, but also a fair one: when enforcement is weak, rules just push users toward the shadows. Aylo even attached a graph — a visual punchline to the story — showing the drop like a cliff dive.
And here’s the kicker. Ofcom, which is supposed to be policing this digital frontier, has reportedly sent out notices of non-compliance to only 69 sites and apps. That’s less than 0.1 percent of the hundreds of thousands of adult destinations online. So much for cleaning up the web.
Aylo’s executives, it seems, have been making the rounds with government officials and Ofcom itself, though they wouldn’t say what was discussed. “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,” their spokesperson wrote in an email. It’s the kind of diplomatic line you give when you’ve already said your piece behind closed doors.
Meanwhile, Ofcom’s list of investigations reads like a rogues’ gallery — from Motherless.com to sites accused of hosting illegal or AI-generated content. But to Aylo, that’s missing the forest for the trees. They’re sitting back, watching the numbers tumble, quietly thinking: we told you so.
First Amendment attorney Lawrence Walters didn’t mince words either. “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,” he said. “Adult users are naturally hesitant to sacrifice their privacy rights and share sensitive personal information as a condition of accessing legal adult content.”
Then he added what feels like the line everyone will remember: “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.”
Short-sighted and impractical — two words that could describe half of internet regulation history. And yet, here we are again: another country, another crackdown, another surge in traffic to places no one can really control.
The question isn’t whether age verification “works.” It’s what we’re willing to trade — privacy, access, freedom — just to pretend it does.
