2016/01/28 by Gareth Tyson, Yehia Elkhatib, Nishanth Sastry +1 · 2 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · Computer Science · #Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology #Digital Games and Media #Spam and Phishing Detection
paper · doi:10.1145/2854003
openalex publication_date 2016/01/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
Today, the Internet is a large multimedia delivery infrastructure, with websites such as YouTube appearing at the top of most measurement studies. However, most traffic studies have ignored an important domain: adult multimedia distribution. Whereas, traditionally, such services were provided primarily via bespoke websites, recently these have converged towards what is known as “Porn 2.0”. These services allow users to upload, view, rate, and comment on videos for free (much like YouTube). Despite their scale, we still lack even a basic understanding of their operation. This article addresses this gap by performing a large-scale study of one of the most popular Porn 2.0 websites: YouPorn. Our measurements reveal a global delivery infrastructure that we have repeatedly crawled to collect statistics (on 183k videos). We use this data to characterise the corpus, as well as to inspect popularity trends and how they relate to other features, for example, categories and ratings. To explore our discoveries further, we use a small-scale user study, highlighting key system implications.