Tyson, Gareth and El Khatib, Yehia and Sastry, Nishanth and Uhlig, Steve (2016) Measurements and analysis of a major adult video portal. ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, 12 (2): 35. ISSN 1551-6857
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 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.