Digital advertising in porn: An ingeniously engineered mechanism [English version]

With 6 billion visitors every month, 136 billion watched videos per year and around $140 billion in revenue for 2022, the porn industry is a digital behemoth. What is the place of the advertising and the mechanism?

Even if the numbers or sources vary, the pornographic websites represent only 4% of internet but we’re talking about 6 billion visitors every month (France TV info 2022), 136 billion watched videos per year (French senate rapport 2022) and more than 50% of internet users (Sexual Alpha 2024). The porn industry generated $140 billion in revenue for 2022 (French senate rapport 2022) and probably more with non-disclosed revenue. Among the most visited or known websites, there are Aylo (formerly MindGeek and Manwin) that owns the websites Pornhub, YouPorn, RedTube… Then, some websites like XHamster, Marc Dorcel and more. We’re talking about free and paid content on traditional porn websites, without forgetting the extra such as sex cam website, social network like OnlyFans, dating websites and others.

Advertising platforms, CPM and cookies

The porn industry uses platform for advertising and also programmatic such as TrafficJunky DSP belonging to Aylo to run ads on their network (Pornhub, YouPorn, RedTube…), ExoClick, TrafficStars etc… In overall, a lot of websites own their own advertising platform. With advertisers and a click through rate less important than on a traditional website, the CPM (cost per mille) for display ads is around 0,30 euro and can be lower until 0,05 euros (Internet marketing forum et Reddit), which is always less than an average CPM on traditional websites for display ads (around 1 euro). It’s also related to a very high “win” rate on this traffic, until 90%.

Beyond the fact that the websites ask if the user is an adult or not, they also use a CMP (consent management platform) for the consent and purposes regarding the cookies. No website uses the TCF (IAB Europe Transparency & Consent Framework).

In addition, the level of granularity is not high regarding the transparency with the user and sometimes there is just a sentence among others with two buttons “Agree” and “Leave” as we can see on the sex cam website Chaturbate.

On the Pornhub website, just by clicking on the “Agree” button drops a cookie in the browser for a year in order to confirm that the user is an adult.

As we can see, the value 1 in the cookie is not clear regarding the user age…

Technical analysis of advertising platform

For this type of inventory, you will not get any ads.txt, sellers.json or standards in order to give transparency about their operation and the advertising platforms used. When a user visits a website, the ad call uses most of the time the categories as keywords for targeting and even the content. We can see it below with the Pornhub and XHamster websites.

By the way, the keywords are picked by the people who upload the videos on the website. On Pornhub or others, those keywords can be moderated by the community and even with a vote system. A real collaboration between the community and the platform.

Like any other traditional website, there are display ads (banner and interstitial), video, audio and others… This can be advertising for promoting actor or content creator, on the website or brands, dating websites, sex cam, etc…

Regarding the URL redirection in the advertising, the mechanism is clear with many intermediaries between the first click and the final destination. The user does not know the end. Let’s have a look at it :

• The website Spankbang displays an ad for a dating website without any info about the final destination (advertiser). A piece of the URL redirection (https://s.magsrv.com/click.php?d=H4sIAAAAAAAAA4WTS4_aMBCA_…) and the advertising below :
• An intermediary collects some info from the previous website to better know the user by providing a survey about taste, location, fantasy… The URL : (https://xflirtin.com/nearby/m/fr/15m/?domain=www.xmtrk.com&…)
• After the previous survey, an other intermediary takes over with an other survey to better shape the profile
• To finally land on the dating website “Connexion voisine” in order to create an account and use it.

This advertising is an example among a lot, because behind a simple banner ad, there are many intermediaries profiling and collecting specific data given by the user. The finale advertiser gets also this data and a potential new member. We estimate at more than 40% VPN users (Security.org) and 40% ad blocker on the porn websites (Digital lab of French gouv). Those numbers do not afraid the websites and advertisers due to the high volume of users willing to be monetised. Quite profitable for a simple ad with a low CPM…

On transparency side, most of the advertising disclose specific information via a dedicated button. Even if the website Pornhub must disclose that information to be aligned with the article 26 from Digital Service Act (identify the ad, the targeting used, the entity who paid the ad…) because it has been identified as a VLOP (Very Large Online Platforms) by the European Commission, the buyer or advertiser is most of the time difficult to identify because not known by the general public.

Focus on the technical side of the advertising and the goal

There are simple advertisings, only one user click goes to an advertiser via a URL redirection without any intermediary. In a more complex way, the following URL from a displayed advertising on the website Spankbang redirects to different advertisers instead of only one (for example, an Adidas ad will redirect only to Adidas. In a carousel ad with many brands in the advertising, the advertisers are rather clearly disclosed). In our case, there is a kind of rotating list of advertisers and it’s not clear for the user with the unique following URL from the advertising below (Link of the advertising with rotating advertisers…).

From the previous advertising, we can go to some advertisers like Fantasmeinterdit, Damesmaturesproches or Mavoisinetentante.

According to the advertising setup which redirects to many advertisers, we may wonder if there is a connexion. Three websites have been tested in a Terminal and it seems that Fantasmeinterdit and Damesmaturesproches come from the same IP address, the same server.

By checking the websites Fantasmeinterdit and Damesmaturesproches, we can see below the use of a unique template on both websites…. A real ad network.

Which brings us to the following question : Is there any other website connected? The answer is yes, because via this IP address, there are 12 websites in total on this server and all related to the porn industry.

Worth noting that with an other color but the same template, the websites Aventurestentantes, Femmesavecsecrets are pretty similar.

The user is not aware, but by answering to some surveys by visiting or subscribing with an email address to one of those 12 websites, the user will help them to build a tailored profile. A real ad network. If we read closely the keywords in the name of the websites, it’s worth noting that the psychology is important (Sentimentssincères in English “TrueFeelings”, Fantasmesinterdit in English “ForbiddenFantaisies”, Jeuxromantique in English “RomanticGames”…). As we can see, a user can be redirected to different content to be pushed into payment :

• Dating website around sex
• Porn websites
• Social network
• Sex cam online
• Etc…

Even if the quality of the advertising is not high level, on average a user can spend between 100 and 500 euros per year for a porn content and in overall, the porn represents 25% of the volume of search on Internet (Quora thread, Sexual Alpha).

The data is key and as explained in the previous part, the user provides it via a survey about taste, location etc… And many times from the advertising to the advertiser, a request to get the email address (well designed for phishing and especially no SupplyChain Object from IAB Tech Lab standard to know who participates in purchasing the ad impression). In addition, some websites encourage the user to create an account in exchange for some extra content.

According to the users, the porn content varies and that’s why more and more websites gather everything at the same place. On a website, we can see videos, sexc am, dating etc… Pretty interesting for a website that becomes an ad network and also for the advertisers.

The websites take also into consideration the time spent per user. According to Pornhub in 2023 (Pornhub Insight 2023), the average time spent is 10 minutes and 9 seconds.

Still according to Pornhub, the mobile is by far the top device.

Regarding the users watching porn via game console, Playstation 4 or 5 owners lead with more than 80% of traffic in this category.

The pornographic websites : A social barometer

Some information need to be highlight regarding the users :

• The age : In theory, a user must be an adult to access to pornographic website but today the access is very easy, especially from any device (computer, mobile, tablet, connected tv…). According to some researches, the users are more and more young, from 10 years old and even younger… (Teen and pornography research 2023 par common sense, Interview of Billie Eilish about her addiction around 11-14 years old).
• The content : Rape, child pornography… The users can watch, upload, download videos and pictures. An environment with a light moderation, even nonexistent…
• Consumption : The average time spent per user is 10 minutes and 9 seconds (Pornhub Insight 2023) but it’s only an average. A lot of users go to the websites a couple of times per day, longer…
• Data : The data theft (on Luscious website, on Pornhub website etc…) can be used for blackmail or else. In overall, the pornographic websites do not sell data purely and simply because, they rather use it in order to influence users (Quartz report)
• Addiction : The pornographic websites damage people, impact couples and families (an example with the actor Terry Crews), modify the perception of sex among both young people and adults…

The pornographic websites are a social barometer. We can see it via the categories highlighted by the trending videos and the searches. On a traditional website using OpenRTB and programmatic, some categories are deprecated such as sex, gender etc… The pornographic websites do not have any limit or almost, which lead to trending searches aligned with the news and worst. We can see it with the website YouJizz for example and a part of the 12563 categories below.

At the end, those words or categories are used for advertising targeting and profile the users, as explained in the previous paragraphs. They also do not hesitate to ask more personal information like user health, especially on the dating websites (are you vaccinated against COVID-19, do you have HIV, religion, politics side…).

Many think that only the pornographic websites need to be monitored, but it’s only a piece of the puzzle. The proliferation of content (connexion with electronic devices, virtual reality headset, artificial intelligence, deepfake etc…) and the ease of access makes this industry evolve quickly and without any limit. The data flooding through all those entities shows an industry out of control.