Measurements and Analysis of a Major Adult Video Portal

Abstract

Today the Internet is a large multimedia delivery infrastructure, with websites such as YouTube appearing at the top of most measurement studies. However, most traffic studies have ignored an important domain: adult multimedia distribution. Whereas, traditionally, such services were provided primarily via bespoke websites, recently these have converged towards what is known as "Porn 2.0". These services allow users to upload, view, rate and comment on videos for free (much like YouTube). Despite their scale, we still lack even a basic understanding of their operation. This paper addresses this gap by performing a large-scale study of one of the most popular Porn 2.0 websites: YouPorn. Our measurements reveal a global delivery infrastructure that we have repeatedly crawled to collect statistics (on 183k videos). We use this data to characterise the corpus, as well as to inspect popularity trends and how they relate to other features, e.g., categories and ratings. To explore our discoveries further, we use a small-scale user study, highlighting key system implications.

Characterizing Web Pornography Consumption from Passive Measurements

“…Fewer works used network measurements to study WP. Tyson et al [17] extract trends and characteristics in a major adult video portal (YouPorn) by analyzing almost 200k videos, together with meta-data such as page content, ratings and tags. In a similar direction, Mazieres et al [11] produce and analyze a semantic network of WP categories, extracted from the portal xHamster, in order to find which are the most dominants and if they are actually meaningful.…”

Dissecting the Workload of a Major Adult Video Portal

“…Although this topic remains a taboo in some research fields, there has been an expanding body of research into the video platforms that drive its delivery. We have seen recent work inspecting the content corpus of popular adult websites [20,18] and their workloads [12,24,3,25] as well as various studies that have attempted to estimate the load that they create on the wider Internet. For example, [14] estimates that Porn 2.0 sites such as xHamster and YouPorn can gain up to 16 million views per month.…”

“…A particularly prevalent form of online video is that of adult content, i.e., pornographic material [3]. In the last five years there has been a surge of research activity in this space, attempting to characterize the content corpus of sites [20,18], the workload of sites [24,3] and the use of adult social networks [19]. Despite this, we still lack the breadth and depth of understanding common to many other aspects of online video delivery.…”

A Non-Stationary Bandit-Learning Approach to Energy-Efficient Femto-Caching with Rateless-Coded Transmission

“…In essence, big data applications are often characterized by concept drift, in which trending topics change over time. Moreover, [43] analyzes and illustrates some examples of concept drift in video streaming. Through data analysis, the authors show that the popularity of a video decreases by moving away from the posting date, or in other words, as the content's age increases.…”