Internet pornography
Internet pornography or online pornography is any pornography that is accessible over the Internet; primarily via websites, FTP connections, peer-to-peer file sharing, or Usenet newsgroups. The greater accessibility of the World Wide Web from the late 1990s led to an incremental growth of Internet pornography, the use of which among adolescents and adults has since become increasingly popular.
Danni's Hard Drive started in 1995 by Danni Ashe is considered one of the earliest online pornography websites. In 2020, estimates suggested there were nearly 30 million pornography websites, comprising about 12% of all websites on the Internet. In 2022, the total amount of pornographic content accessible online was estimated to be over 10,000 terabytes. The four most accessed pornography websites are Pornhub, xHamster, XVideos, and XNXX.
, a single company, Aylo, owns and operates most of the popular online streaming pornography websites, including: Pornhub, RedTube, Tube8, and YouPorn, as well as pornographic film studios like: Brazzers, Digital Playground, Reality Kings, and Sean Cody among others, but it does not own websites like xHamster, XVideos, and XNXX. Some have alleged that the company is a monopoly.
Introduction
Starting in the late 1980s, the Internet has played a major part in increasing access to pornography. Usenet newsgroups provided the base for what has been called the "amateur revolution" where amateur pornographers, with the help of digital cameras and the Internet, created and distributed their own pornographic content independent of the mainstream networks.The use of the World Wide Web became popular with the introduction of Netscape navigator in 1994. This development paved the way for newer methods of distribution and consumption of pornography.
The Internet as a medium to access pornography became so popular that in 1995 Time published a cover story titled "Cyberporn".
Danni's Hard Drive started in 1995, by Danni Ashe is considered one of the earliest online pornographic websites; coded by Ashe, a former stripper and nude model, the website was reported by CNN in 2000 to have made revenues of $6.5 million.
In 2012, the total number of pornographic websites was estimated to be around 25 million, comprising 12% of all websites.
In 2022, the amount of pornographic content accessible online was estimated at over 10,000 terabytes.
In 2024, according to the DSA regulation, 59 out of 100 Spaniards visits one of the three biggest websites monthly.
Before its shutdown in 2025, ThisAV was a popular pornographic website in Hong Kong.
History and methods of distribution
Before the World Wide Web
Pornography is regarded by some as one of the driving forces behind the expansion of the World Wide Web, like camcorders, VCRs and cable television before it. Prior to the development of the World Wide Web, pornographic images had been transmitted over the Internet as ASCII porn. To send images over network required computers with graphics capabilities and higher network bandwidth. In the late 1980s and early 1990s this was possible through the use of anonymous FTP servers and the Gopher protocol, an early content delivery protocol that was later displaced by HTTP. One of the early Gopher/FTP sites to compile pornography was the Digital Archive on the 17th Floor at TU Delft. This small image archive contained some low quality scanned pornographic images that were initially available to anyone anonymously. The site soon became restricted to Netherlands only access after traffic grew to over 10,000 users around the world, who were obtaining approximately 30,000 images a day.Usenet groups
s provided an early way of sharing images over the narrow bandwidth available in the early 1990s. Because of the network restrictions of the time, images had to be encoded as ascii text and then broken into sections before being posted to the Alt.binaries of the usenet. These files could then be downloaded and then reassembled before being decoded back to an image. Automated software such as Aub allowed the automatic download and assembly of the images from a newsgroup. There was rapid growth in the number of posts in the early 1990s but image quality was restricted by the size of files that could be posted.This method was also used to disseminate pornographic images, which were usually scanned from adult magazines. This type of distribution was generally free, and provided a great deal of anonymity. The anonymity made it safe and easy to ignore copyright restrictions, as well as protecting the identity of uploaders and downloaders. Around this time frame, pornography was also distributed via pornographic Bulletin Board Systems such as Rusty n Edie's. These BBSes could charge users for access, leading to the first commercial online pornography.
A 1995 article written in The Georgetown Law Journal titled "Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway: A Survey of 917,410 Images, Description, Short Stories and Animations Downloaded 8.5 Million Times by Consumers in Over 2000 Cities in Forty Countries, Provinces and Territories" by Martin Rimm, a Carnegie Mellon University graduate student, claimed that 83.5% of the images on Usenet newsgroups where images were stored were pornographic in nature. Before publication, Philip Elmer-DeWitt used the research in a Time magazine article, "On a Screen Near You: Cyberporn." The findings were attacked by journalists and civil liberties advocates who insisted the findings were seriously flawed. "Rimm's implication that he might be able to determine 'the percentage of all images available on the Usenet that are pornographic on any given day' was sheer fantasy" wrote Mike Godwin in HotWired. The research was cited during a session of U.S. Congress. The student changed his name and disappeared from public view. Godwin recounts the episode in "Fighting a Cyberporn Panic" in his book Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age.
The invention of the World Wide Web spurred both commercial and non-commercial distribution of pornography. The rise of pornography websites offering photos, video clips and streaming media including live webcam access allowed greater access to pornography.
Free vs. commercial
Both commercial and free pornographic sites are common on the Internet. The bandwidth usage of a pornographic website is relatively high, which can lead to large web hosting and Internet costs. Free websites, which often use advertising revenue to earn income, may not earn a sufficient amount to cover the costs of web hosting. One entry into the free pornographic website market are thumbnail gallery post sites. These are free websites that post links to commercial sites, providing a sampling of the commercial site in the form of thumbnail images, or in the form of Free Hosted Galleries—samplings of full-sized content provided and hosted by the commercial sites to promote their site. Some free websites primarily serve as portals by keeping up-to-date indexes of these smaller sampler sites. When a user purchases a subscription to a commercial site after clicking through from a free thumbnail gallery site, the commercial site makes a payment to the owner of the free site. There are several forms of sites delivering adult content.TGP
A common form of adult content is a categorized list of small pictures linked to galleries. These sites are called a thumbnail gallery post. As a rule, these sites sort thumbnails by category and type of content available on a linked gallery. Sites containing thumbnails that lead to galleries with video content are called MGP. The main benefit of TGP/MGP is that the surfer can get a first impression of the content provided by a gallery without actually visiting it.However, TGP sites are open to abuse, with the most abusive form being the so-called CJ, that contains links that mislead the surfer to sites he or she actually did not wish to see. This is also called a redirect.
Linklists
Linklists, unlike TGP/MGP sites, do not display a huge number of pictures. A linklist is a categorised web list of links to so-called "freesites*", but unlike TGPs, links are provided in a form of text, not thumbs. It is still a question which form is more descriptive to a surfer, but many webmasters cite a trend that thumbs are much more productive, and simplify searching. On the other hand, linklists have a larger amount of unique text, which helps them improve their positions in search engine listings. TopLists are linklists whose internal ranking of freesites is based on incoming traffic from those freesites, except that freesites designed for TopLists have many more galleries.Peer-to-peer
file sharing networks provide another form of free access to pornography. While such networks have been associated largely with the illegal sharing of copyrighted music and movies, the sharing of pornography has also been a popular use for file sharing. Many commercial sites have recognized this trend and have begun distributing free samples of their content on peer-to-peer networks.Viewership
As of 2011, the majority of viewers of online pornography were men; women tended to prefer romance novels and erotic fan fiction. Women comprised about one quarter to one third of visitors to popular pornography websites, but were only 2% of subscribers to pay sites. Subscribers with female names were flagged as signs of potential credit card fraud, because "so many of these charges result in an angry wife or mother demanding a refund for the misuse of her card."Nonetheless, women spend more time on average on pornography websites, particularly Pornhub, than men and were more interested in pornography upon marriage. An anti-porn research group, Barna Group and Covenant Eyes, reported in 2020 that "33% of women aged 25 and under search for porn at least once per month.
A 2015 study found "a big jump" in pornography viewing over the past few decades, with the largest increase driven by the people born in the 1970s and 1980s. While the study's authors noted this increase is "smaller than conventional wisdom might predict," it is still quite significant. Those who were born since the 1980s onward were the first to grow up in a world where they had access to the Internet from their teenage years, this early exposure and accessibility of Internet pornography might have been the primary driver of this increase.
States that are highly religious and conservative were found to search for more Internet pornography.