Methodology & sources

Adult Web Census reports only what public data supports. Every figure on the site is drawn from a named source and carries the date it was gathered. Here is where each number comes from and what it does — and does not — mean.

The roster

The census tracks a curated set of well-known adult platforms across six categories: tube (free video), live cam, creator-subscription, premium studio, adult dating, and animated / hentai. The roster is a starting set, not a ranking of “the biggest” — inclusion means a site is publicly and unambiguously an adult platform, not that it meets any traffic threshold.

Traffic rank

Ranks are taken daily from the Tranco list, a research-grade ranking that averages several providers over 30 days to resist manipulation. A lower number means more visited. A site absent from the top of the list simply isn’t ranked there; we never invent a position.

Availability & blocking

Blocking data comes from OONI (the Open Observatory of Network Interference), whose volunteers run network measurements worldwide. For each site and country we report OONI’s counts over the last 30 days:

Confirmed — a block was positively fingerprinted (e.g. a known block page).
Anomalous — access failed in a way consistent with blocking, but unconfirmed.
OK — the site was reachable in that measurement.

Absence of measurements is never treated as evidence that access is open. Coverage depends on where volunteers run probes, so a lightly-measured country can under-report real restrictions. We show measured / confirmed / anomalous as three distinct states and never collapse them.

Measured availability (active probe)

To see what sites actually serve — not just what the law requires — we fetch each site’s homepage from many locations through datacenter proxies and classify the response by structural markers only: an age-verification wall (a specific verification vendor, or an interstitial whose whole purpose is age-checking), an explicit block or withdrawal notice, a normal reachable page, or an edge block. Two rules keep this honest:

A wall or notice must be corroborated across repeat fetches before we report it; a single flaky response never flips a site to “walled”.
Many sites refuse datacenter IP addresses. When a site blocks our probe, we record “not measurable” — never “blocked in your country”. A site that refuses us everywhere is flagged unmeasurable and its map is read with caution.

This measures datacenter-egress behaviour, which can differ from a home connection. It complements — it does not replace — the OONI network measurements above. For sites that refuse datacenter addresses, and to confirm the marquee state-blocks from a real home connection, we re-probe from residential IP addresses; those rows are marked “residential”.

Infrastructure

Each site’s fingerprint is measured from public signals: RDAP/WHOIS (registrar and registration dates), the TLS handshake (certificate issuer), DNS, HTTP response headers (server and CDN), certificate-transparency logs via crt.sh, and the first snapshot in the Internet Archive. The “2257 notice”, “RTA label”, and “age-verification vendor” fields test for specific, documented markers on the site’s homepage; when a page can’t be fetched, the field reads “unknown” rather than “no”.

Ownership

Corporate parents are compiled from public company records and reporting. Ownership in this industry changes and is often deliberately opaque, so each company page is dated and recent changes are noted. Where a link between entities cannot be established from public records, we leave it blank rather than infer it.

Laws

The age-verification and access laws we list each link to a public source — a bill, statute, regulator page, or court record — and are dated. Legislation moves quickly; a status of “enjoined” means a court has blocked enforcement. We record what the source says, not a prediction of what a law will do.

What this site is not

It is not a directory of adult content, hosts none, and links to no adult site as a destination. It does not rank sites by quality or endorse any of them. It is a record of public facts about an industry, kept for readers who want to understand how it is regulated, owned, and reached.

Questions or corrections travel through the source links on each page. Back to the census.