Pornhub has announced it will restrict access to its website in the UK, citing stricter age-verification requirements introduced under the Online Safety Act (OSA).
From February 2, only users who already have an existing Pornhub account will be able to access the site’s content. New users in the UK will be blocked entirely.
The adult platform said the move was prompted by what it described as the “failure” of the OSA’s age-verification rules, which require explicit websites to prevent children from accessing pornographic material.
In October, Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo, reported that traffic to the site in the UK had fallen by 77% following the introduction of tougher age checks.
At the time, media regulator Ofcom said the measures were working as intended, arguing that stricter verification was helping prevent children from inadvertently encountering inappropriate content online. The BBC has since contacted Ofcom for comment on Pornhub’s latest announcement.
Despite the restriction, Pornhub remains the largest pornographic platform in the UK, according to web analytics firm Similarweb.
Aylo’s head of community and brand, Alex Kekesi, said the decision to restrict access had not been taken lightly.
“Our sites, which host legal and regulated porn, will no longer be available in the UK to new users, but thousands of irresponsible porn sites will still be easy to access,” she said in a statement.
Kekesi added that the company initially complied with the OSA requirements in the hope that Ofcom would enforce the law effectively across the industry.
“Because we wanted to believe that a determined and prepared regulator in Ofcom could take poor legislation and manage to enforce compliance in a meaningful way,” she said.
However, six months after the age-verification rules came into force, Kekesi argued that Aylo’s experience suggested the legislation had failed to achieve its core objective of protecting children online.
She said that from February 2, UK users attempting to access Pornhub without an existing account would be met with “a wall” instead of the site’s content.
