From Evangelical Focus.
The UK’s most visited pornographic website lost over a million visitors. “Our children deserve a porn free childhood”, says the Online Safety lead for Christian charity CARE.
Since the Industry Guidance came into effect at the end of July, requiring stronger age verification measures for accessing pornographic websites in the UK, traffic to these sites has significantly decreased.
According to data from web analytics firm SimilarWeb, the UK’s most visited site of this kind experienced a 47% decline in visitor numbers in just two weeks following the implementation of age controls, falling from 3.2 million to 2 million.
Other platforms offering the same type of content saw similar declines: one specialising in videos fell by a half, while OnlyFans, the popular subscription service where users often upload and consume pornographic content, experienced a 10% decline.
Small companies and VNP use
Despite the widespread decline of major adult content providers on the internet, smaller, less regulated websites have experienced an increase in traffic, and the regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries (Ofcom) is still investigating four companies managing more than 30 websites with pornographic content to assess compliance.
Furthermore, the implementation of the law coincided with a tenfold rise in the usage of virtual private networks (VPNs), which allows the users to hide their geographical location, and they may be using it to avoid access controls.
CARE: “Our children deserve a porn free childhood”
For Tim Cairns, Online Safety Lead for the Christian charity in the UK, CARE, “these new figures are hardly a surprise because if you make porn harder to access, then you’d expect to see a drop in users. What is critical to note is this means thousands of children have been rightly prevented from seeing porn online”.