Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

YouTube of porn: longitudinal measurement, analysis, and characterization of a large porn streaming service

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Social Network Analysis and Mining Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Video content on user-generated content services has redefined entertainment and business on the Internet. Adult video streaming services have embraced this evolution to form YouTube style porn sites which combine the features of video hosting websites and online social media services. This paper presents a comprehensive measurement study of one of the most popular new-age porn websites with social networking features—xHamster. Using active measurements, we have obtained metadata on almost 4 million unique videos that span the lifetime of xHamster from 2007 to 2018. An analysis of this corpus allowed us to characterize the service and gain insights into the key players of the website including the website owners, video uploaders, and the viewers. By studying the characteristics of videos such as views, duration, the number of uploads, tags, ratings and comments, we give an overview of xHamster’s current state, compare it to traditional and adult streaming services, and find the niche that xHamster occupies as an amateur content focused service. We find that there are significant differences between adult streaming services and traditional streaming services. The injection rate of new videos is lower but the website does not need a large number of new uploads as long as the front page is constantly refreshed. The length of an average adult video is shorter than that of the average video on traditional streaming services, and we find that there is minimal engagement with ratings and comments. Video tags are actively used to organize and filter through content, and we observe that the more tags a video has, the more views it is likely to obtain.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12
Fig. 13
Fig. 14
Fig. 15
Fig. 16
Fig. 17
Fig. 18
Fig. 19
Fig. 20
Fig. 21

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm.

  2. https://www.wyzowl.com/video-social-media-2019/.

  3. https://xhamster.com/blog/posts/9715646.

  4. https://blog.pex.com/what-content-dominates-on-youtube-390811c0932d.

  5. https://www.statista.com/statistics/259477/hours-of-video-uploaded-to-youtube-every-minute/.

  6. https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/YouTube.com?ver=classic.

  7. https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2017-year-in-review.

  8. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple-iphone-sales-since-3rd-quarter-2007/.

  9. https://xhamster.com/blog/posts/745297.

  10. https://tubularinsights.com/average-youtube-views/.

  11. https://www.similarweb.com/website/YouTube.com/.

  12. A mapping of the full form tags and their abbreviations is available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p2YVReReZI_i0-H3ada3kFSLyRCnkn2P/.

References

  • Adhikari VK, Guo Y, Hao F, Varvello M, Hilt V, Steiner M., Zhang ZL (2012) Unreeling Netflix: understanding and improving multi-CDN movie delivery. In: 2012 proceedings IEEE INFOCOM. IEEE, pp 1620–1628

  • Ahmed F, Shafiq MZ, Liu AX (2016) The internet is for porn: measurement and analysis of online adult traffic. In: 2016 IEEE 36th international conference on distributed computing systems (ICDCS). IEEE, pp 88–97

  • Alexa: Xhamster competitive analysis, marketing mix and traffic—Alexa (2019). https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/xhamster.com. Accessed 8 June 2019

  • Basher N, Mahanti A, Mahanti A, Williamson C, Arlitt M (2008) A comparative analysis of web and peer-to-peer traffic. In: Proceedings of the 17th international conference on world wide web. ACM, pp 287–296

  • Borghol Y, Ardon S, Carlsson N, Eager D, Mahanti A (2012) The untold story of the clones: content-agnostic factors that impact YouTube video popularity. In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining. ACM, pp 1186–1194

  • Coletto M, Aiello LM, Lucchese C, Silvestri F (2017) Adult content consumption in online social networks. Soc Netw Anal Min 7(1):28

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Coopersmith J (2000) Pornography, videotape and the internet. IEEE Technol Soc Mag 19(1):27–34

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cullen C (2019) Sandvine releases 2019 global internet phenomena report. https://www.sandvine.com/press-releases/sandvine-releases-2019-global-internet-phenomena-report. Accessed 17 Dec 2019

  • Daer AR, Hoffman R, Goodman S (2014) Rhetorical functions of hashtag forms across social media applications. In: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM international conference on the design of communication CD-ROM, pp 1–3

  • Dwulit AD, Rzymski P (2019) Prevalence, patterns and self-perceived effects of pornography consumption in Polish university students: a cross-sectional study. Int J Environ Res Public Health 16(10):1861

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Farrelly B, Sun Y, Mahanti A, Gong M (2017) Video workload characteristics of online porn: perspectives from a major video streaming service. In: 2017 IEEE 42nd conference on local computer networks (LCN). IEEE, pp 518–519

  • Frankel TC (2018) Why almost no one is making a living on YouTube. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/03/02/why-almost-no-one-is-making-a-living-on-youtube/. Accessed 17 Dec 2019

  • Gill P, Arlitt M, Li Z, Mahanti A (2007) YouTube traffic characterization: a view from the edge. In: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM conference on internet measurement. ACM, pp 15–28

  • Haffey M, Arlitt M, Williamson C (2018) Modeling, analysis, and characterization of periodic traffic on a campus edge network. In: 2018 IEEE 26th international symposium on modeling, analysis, and simulation of computer and telecommunication systems (MASCOTS). IEEE, pp 170–182

  • Harford T (2019) Does pornography still drive the internet?—BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48283409. Accessed 09 June 2019

  • Hromic H, Hayes C (2019) Characterising and evaluating dynamic online communities from live microblogging user interactions. Soc Netw Anal Min 9(1):30

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Huang J, Tang Y, Hu Y, Li J, Hu C (2019) Predicting the active period of popularity evolution: a case study on twitter hashtags. Inf Sci 512:315–326

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jarassriwilai T, Dauber T, Brownlee N, Mahanti A (2015) Understanding evolution and adoption of top-level domain names. In: 2015 IEEE 40th local computer networks conference workshops (LCN Workshops). IEEE, pp 687–694

  • Laterman M, Arlitt M, Williamson C (2017) A campus-level view of netflix and twitch: characterization and performance implications. In: 2017 international symposium on performance evaluation of computer and telecommunication systems (SPECTS). IEEE, pp 1–8

  • MacKinnon CA (1985) Pornography, civil rights, and speech. Harv CR-CLL Rev 20:1

    Google Scholar 

  • Mahanti A, Williamson C, Carlsson N, Arlitt M, Mahanti A (2011) Characterizing the file hosting ecosystem: a view from the edge. Perform Eval 68(11):1085–1102

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mahanti A, Carlsson N, Mahanti A, Arlitt M, Williamson C (2013) A tale of the tails: power-laws in internet measurements. IEEE Netw 27(1):59–64

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mahanti A, Carlsson N, Williamson C (2012) Content sharing dynamics in the global file hosting landscape. In: 2012 IEEE 20th international symposium on modeling, analysis and simulation of computer and telecommunication systems. IEEE, pp 219–228

  • Mahanti A, Williamson C, Wu L (2009) Workload characterization of a large systems conference web server. In: 2009 seventh annual communication networks and services research conference. IEEE, pp 55–64

  • Mazières A, Trachman M, Cointet JP, Coulmont B, Prieur C (2014) Deep tags: toward a quantitative analysis of online pornography. Porn Stud 1(1–2):80–95

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McCullough B (2015) Chapter 6—a history of internet porn. http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2015/01/history-of-internet-porn/. Accessed 17 Dec 2019

  • Mehrotra R, Bhattacharya P (2017) Characterizing and predicting supply-side engagement on video sharing platforms using a Hawkes process model. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR International conference on theory of information retrieval. ACM, pp 159–166

  • Meuwissen I, Over R (1990) Habituation and dishabituation of female sexual arousal. Behav Res Ther 28(3):217–226

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mislove A, Marcon M, Gummadi KP, Druschel P, Bhattacharjee B (2007) Measurement and analysis of online social networks. In: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM conference on internet measurement. ACM, pp 29–42

  • Mitra S, Agrawal M, Yadav A, Carlsson N, Eager D, Mahanti A (2011) Characterizing web-based video sharing workloads. ACM Trans Web (TWEB) 5(2):8

    Google Scholar 

  • Morichetta A, Trevisan M, Vassio L (2019) Characterizing web pornography consumption from passive measurements. In: International conference on passive and active network measurement. Springer, pp 304–316

  • O’Donohue W, Plaud JJ (1991) The long-term habituation of sexual arousal in the human male. J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry 22(2):87–96

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Project TS, Efoui-Hess M (2019) “Climate crisis: the unsustainable use of online video”: our new report on the environmental impact of ICT. https://theshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2019-02.pdf. Accessed 17 Dec 2019

  • Sastry NR (2012) How to tell head from tail in user-generated content corpora. In: Sixth international AAAI conference on weblogs and social media

  • Siersdorfer S, Chelaru S, Pedro JS, Altingovde IS, Nejdl W (2014) Analyzing and mining comments and comment ratings on the social web. ACM Trans Web (TWEB) 8(3):17

    Google Scholar 

  • Small TA (2011) What the hashtag? A content analysis of Canadian politics on Twitter. Inf Commun Society 14(6):872–895

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Song YD, Gong M, Mahanti A (2019) Measurement and analysis of an adult video streaming service. In: 2019 IEEE/ACM international conference on advances in social networks analysis and mining (ASONAM). IEEE

  • Song YD, Mahanti A (2019) Comparison of mobile and fixed device workloads in an academic web server. In: 2019 IEEE international symposium on measurements & networking (M&N). IEEE, pp 1–6

  • Song YD, Mahanti A, Ravichandran SC (2019) Understanding evolution and adoption of top level domains and DNSSEC. In: 2019 IEEE international symposium on measurements & networking (M&N). IEEE, pp 1–6

  • Tuna T, Akbas E, Aksoy A, Canbaz MA, Karabiyik U, Gonen B, Aygun R (2016) User characterization for online social networks. Soc Netw Anal Min 6(1):104

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tyson G, Elkhatib Y, Sastry N, Uhlig S (2016) Measurements and analysis of a major adult video portal. ACM Trans Multimedia Comput Commun Appl (TOMM) 12(2):35

    Google Scholar 

  • Tyson G, Elkhatib Y, Sastry N, Uhlig S (2013) Demystifying porn 2.0: a look into a major adult video streaming website. In: Proceedings of the 2013 conference on internet measurement conference. ACM, pp 417–426

  • Tyson G, Elkhatib Y, Sastry N, Uhlig S (2015) Are people really social in porn 2.0? In: Ninth international AAAI conference on web and social media

  • Vallina P, Feal Á, Gamba J, Vallina-Rodriguez N, Anta AF (2019) Tales from the porn: a comprehensive privacy analysis of the web porn ecosystem. In: Proceedings of the internet measurement conference. ACM, pp 245–258

  • Wikipedia contributors: XHamster—Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (2019). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHamster. Accessed 07 June 2019

  • Yu R, Christophersen C, Song YD, Mahanti A (2019) Comparative analysis of adult video streaming services: characteristics and workload. In: 2019 network traffic measurement and analysis conference (TMA). IEEE, pp 49–56

  • Zappavigna M (2018) Searchable talk: hashtags and social media metadiscourse. Bloomsbury Publishing, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Zhang S, Zhang H, Yang J, Song G, Wu J (2019) Measurement and analysis of adult websites in IPV6 networks. In: 2019 20th Asia-Pacific network operations and management symposium (APNOMS). IEEE, pp 1–6

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Cameron Wong, Yo-Der Song & Aniket Mahanti

  2. University of New Brunswick, Saint John, Canada

    Aniket Mahanti

Authors
  1. Cameron Wong
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Yo-Der Song
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Aniket Mahanti
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Aniket Mahanti.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Wong, C., Song, YD. & Mahanti, A. YouTube of porn: longitudinal measurement, analysis, and characterization of a large porn streaming service. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 10, 62 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-020-00661-8

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-020-00661-8

Keywords

Search

Navigation