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

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.