TL;DR: The BBC’s own poor reporting on the success of age verification is one of the reasons some people distrust mainstream media, selective reporting helps nobody.
The BBC recently published a piece claiming that UK visits to major porn sites have dropped sharply since the new
Online Safety Act age verification rules took effect on 25 July.
They cite Similarweb data showing a large decline for Pornhub in late July and early August, with XVideos and OnlyFans also down.
It makes for a tidy headline. Regulation works, traffic falls, and under-18s are better protected. Look at the same data
source in full, and a different picture appears.
Has BBC News website started using age verification?
Has BBC News website started using age verification?The BBC focuses on adult sites’ “plummeting” traffic without acknowledging that their own website has experienced a downward trend in the same period. Our Similarweb screenshots for July 2025 show
BBC.co.uk at 572.3 million worldwide visits, sliding week on week across the month.
If a fall in visits is taken as proof of policy success, the BBC would need to admit its own site is “losing” too.
That context is missing from their article.
Global adult site traffic is still massive, despite age verification
Global adult site traffic is still massive, despite age verificationThe BBC frames the story as if the rules are crippling the industry. Yet globally, Pornhub recorded 1.72 billion visits in July 2025, up 2% month on month, with
86% of visits on mobile. Competitors such as XVideos and
XHamster remain well above the billion-visits mark.
Even the BBC’s piece admits that some smaller and less regulated sites saw traffic increase. But here’s the important bit to remember from the BBC article:
A spokesperson for Pornhub told the BBC: “As we’ve seen in many jurisdictions around the world, there is often a drop in traffic for compliant sites and an increase in traffic for non-compliant sites.”
A spokesperson for Pornhub told the BBC: “As we’ve seen in many jurisdictions around the world, there is often a drop in traffic for compliant sites and an increase in traffic for non-compliant sites.”That is not a collapse. It is a shift.
Similarweb: Pornhub 1.72B visits in July 2025, 86% mobile.
Where displaced traffic goes – The DarkNet?
Where displaced traffic goes – The DarkNet?The BBC notes that VPN downloads surged after enforcement began. That matters. VPNs allow users to bypass geographic blocks and age checks entirely. Once users step outside the regulated platforms, they are more likely to land on offshore sites with weaker moderation.
Oh wait, visits to the TOR website – where you download the TOR browser, are up 8.39%
A share of users will go further and use the DarkNet. Unlike mainstream platforms, DarkNet markets sit beyond public
oversight. That is where the most extreme and often illegal material circulates, far from age checks, moderation or
meaningful accountability.
The very thing that the Online Safety Act was trying to prevent
What the selective framing leaves out
- Traffic drops are not unique to adult sites. BBC.co.uk shows a similar downward trend, as does the TOR website.
- Global adult traffic remains enormous. Some platforms are stable or growing.
- Restrictions can displace users to less regulated spaces, including the DarkNet.
Cherry-picking a fortnight of UK figures without broader context creates the illusion of a simple win. A serious
conversation about online safety needs to consider the whole ecosystem, the incentives created by enforcement, and the unintended consequences that may make harm more likely rather than less.
Evidence used in this post
- Similarweb screenshots comparing Pornhub vs BBC worldwide visits for July 2025.
- Similarweb dashboard totals for Pornhub in July 2025 and competitor scales.
- Similarweb device distribution and geography breakouts.
Similarweb: Geography breakdown for Pornhub, July 2025.Sources referenced by the BBC include the Online Safety Act requirements and Ofcom guidance on age verification
approaches. This post uses the same analytics source to provide the missing context: SimilarWeb
Unfortunately, there is a bigger picture to this. Debunking the BBC News story was easy to do, it’s just sloppy journalism and they probably think nobody will check.
And this is the point, somebody did, and it proves two things:
- Age verification has made little or no difference, other than to put a very minor obstacle in porn user’s way.
- Equipped users with the mentality that they aren’t handing over their IDs (maybe for fear of a Tea App data breach) to third-party websites, so this potentially exposes them the DarkNet and its lawlessness
