UK: leading adult entertainers on pornhub.com 2023
In 2023, adult entertainment performer Elle Brooke was the most popular online personality on the pornographic platform Pornhub for audiences in the United Kingdom (UK). American social media personality and pornographic performer Sky Bri ranked second, while Abella Danger - who was the most popular performer on the platform for global users in 2023, ranked third.
Market leader Pornhub.com: inside user consumption trends
Launched in 2007, Pornhub.com has become the flagship website for online pornography and adult content hosting. In 2023, Pornhub was the most visited pornographic website in the UK, recording over 406 million visits in the month of December. The platform, formerly under Manwin, and later Aylo, was bought in March 2023 by the Canadian private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners. In 2023, the website’s main audience was composed of users aged between 25 and 34 years – as 30 percent of Pornhub viewers were adults in this demographic. The distribution of pornhub.com audiences was deeply unbalanced, as only 30 percent of the platform’s audience was composed of women, versus 70 percent of men.
Age of restrictions: protect or kill the business?
At the beginning of 2024, Pornhub decided to block access to its website in the U.S. states of Montana and North Carolina. According to the company, the age verification regulations would jeopardize users’ privacy, hence the decision to stop servicing the two states.
In the United Kingdom, the media regulator Ofcom has proposed a set of measures to implement within the country’s Online Safety Act to better regulate access based on age. While it is still unclear whether this would hurt the online pornography market, a 2023 survey revealed that only three in 10 UK respondents would comply with age checks to access porn content online, while over five in 10 would leave the website. In 2023, the most commonly used age verification methods when accessing online pornography relied on users’ disclosure of their birthdate, or a simple box tick to confirm they were 18 or older. While this is supposed to be a start, children and other vulnerable users might still manage to access content they do not have the appropriate age to view.
