Internet pornography or online pornography is any pornography that is accessible over the Internet; primarily via websites, FTP connections, peer-to-peer file sharing, or Usenet newsgroups. The greater accessibility of the World Wide Web from the late 1990s led to an incremental growth of Internet pornography, the use of which among adolescents and adults has since become increasingly popular. Danni's Hard Drive started in 1995 by Danni Ashe is considered one of the earliest online pornography websites. In 2020, estimates suggested there were nearly 30 million pornography websites, comprising about 12% of all websites on the Internet. In 2022, the total amount of pornographic content accessible online was estimated to be over 10,000 terabytes. The four most accessed pornography websites are Pornhub, xHamster, XVideos, and XNXX. As of 2025, a single company, Aylo, owns and operates most of the popular online streaming pornography websites, including: Pornhub, RedTube, Tube8, and YouPorn, as well as pornographic film studios like: Brazzers, Digital Playground, Reality Kings, and Sean Cody among others, but it does not own websites like xHamster, XVideos, and XNXX. Some have alleged that the company is a monopoly.
Introduction Starting in the late 1980s, the Internet has played a major part in increasing access to pornography. Usenet newsgroups provided the base for what has been called the "amateur revolution" where amateur pornographers, with the help of digital cameras and the Internet, created and distributed their own pornographic content independent of the mainstream networks. The use of the World Wide Web became popular with the introduction of Netscape navigator in 1994. This development paved the way for newer methods of distribution and consumption of pornography. The Internet as a medium to access pornography became so popular that in 1995 Time published a cover story titled "Cyberporn". Danni's Hard Drive started in 1995, by Danni Ashe is considered one of the earliest online pornographic websites; coded by Ashe, a former stripper and nude model, the website was reported by CNN in 2000 to have made revenues of $6.5 million. In 2012, the total number of pornographic websites was estimated to be around 25 million, comprising 12% of all websites. In 2022, the amount of pornographic content accessible online was estimated at over 10,000 terabytes. In 2024, according to the DSA regulation, 59 out of 100 Spaniards visits one of the three biggest websites monthly. Before its shutdown in 2025, ThisAV was a popular pornographic website in Hong Kong.
History and methods of distribution
Before the World Wide Web Pornography is regarded by some as one of the driving forces behind the expansion of the World Wide Web, like camcorders, VCRs and cable television before it. Prior to the development of the World Wide Web, pornographic images had been transmitted over the Internet as ASCII porn. To send images over network required computers with graphics capabilities and higher network bandwidth. In the late 1980s and early 1990s this was possible through the use of anonymous FTP servers and the Gopher protocol, an early content delivery protocol that was later displaced by HTTP. One of the early Gopher/FTP sites to compile pornography was the Digital Archive on the 17th Floor at TU Delft. This small image archive contained some low quality scanned pornographic images that were initially available to anyone anonymously. The site soon became restricted to Netherlands only access after traffic grew to over 10,000 users around the world, who were obtaining approximately 30,000 images a day.
Usenet groups Usenet newsgroups provided an early way of sharing images over the narrow bandwidth available in the early 1990s. Because of the network restrictions of the time, images had to be encoded as ascii text and then broken into sections before being posted to the Alt.binaries of the usenet. These files could then be downloaded and then reassembled before being decoded back to an image. Automated software such as Aub (Assemble Usenet Binaries) allowed the automatic download and assembly of the images from a newsgroup. There was rapid growth in the number of posts in the early 1990s but image quality was restricted by the size of files that could be posted. This method was also used to disseminate pornographic images, which were usually scanned from adult magazines. This type of distribution was generally free (apart from fees for Internet access), and provided a great deal of anonymity. The anonymity made it safe and easy to ignore copyright restrictions, as well as protecting the identity of uploaders and downloaders. Around this time frame, pornography was also distributed via pornographic Bulletin Board Systems such as Rusty n Edie's. These BBSes could charge users for access, leading to the first commercial online pornography. A 1995 article written in The Georgetown Law Journal titled "Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway: A Survey of 917,410 Images, Description, Short Stories and Animations Downloaded 8.5 Million Times by Consumers in Over 2000 Cities in Forty Countries, Provinces and Territories" by Martin Rimm, a Carnegie Mellon University graduate student, claimed that (as of 1994) 83.5% of the images on Usenet newsgroups where images were stored were pornographic in nature. Before publication, Philip Elmer-DeWitt used the research in a Time magazine article, "On a Screen Near You: Cyberporn." The findings were attacked by journalists and civil liberties advocates who insisted the findings were seriously flawed. "Rimm's implication that he might be able to determine 'the percentage of all images available on the Usenet that are pornographic on any given day' was sheer fantasy" wrote Mike Godwin in HotWired. The research was cited during a session of U.S. Congress. The student changed his name and disappeared from public view. Godwin recounts the episode in "Fighting a Cyberporn Panic" in his book Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age. The invention of the World Wide Web spurred both commercial and non-commercial distribution of pornography. The rise of pornography websites offering photos, video clips and streaming media including live webcam access allowed greater access to pornography.
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