Demystifying porn 2.0: a look into a major adult video streaming website

Abstract

The Internet has evolved into a huge video delivery infrastructure, with websites such as YouTube and Netflix appearing at the top of most traffic measurement studies. However, most traffic studies have largely kept silent about an area of the Internet that (even today) is poorly understood: adult media distribution. Whereas ten years ago, such services were provided primarily via peer-to-peer file sharing and bespoke websites, recently these have converged towards what is known as ``Porn 2.0''. These popular web portals allow users to upload, view, rate and comment videos for free. Despite this, we still lack even a basic understanding of how users interact with these services. This paper seeks to address this gap by performing the first large-scale measurement study of one of the most popular Porn 2.0 websites: YouPorn. We have repeatedly crawled the website to collect statistics about 183k videos, witnessing over 60 billion views. Through this, we offer the first characterisation of this type of corpus, highlighting the nature of YouPorn's repository. We also inspect the popularity of objects and how they relate to other features such as the categories to which they belong. We find evidence for a high level of flexibility in the interests of its user base, manifested in the extremely rapid decay of content popularity over time, as well as high susceptibility to browsing order. Using a small-scale user study, we validate some of our findings and explore the infrastructure design and management implications of our observations.