The state of the adult web

A standing, data-driven overview of the adult-site industry, built from the census and refreshed as the data updates. Every figure below is drawn from a public source named on the relevant page. This site hosts no adult content.

Ownership is concentrated

A handful of groups operate a large share of the best-known brands. The five largest owners in the census account for 29 of the tracked sites.

The money: OnlyFans, by its own accounts

The one major platform that files full public accounts is OnlyFans (Fenix International Ltd, UK). Its most recent filing shows the scale of the creator economy in a single company:

See the full figures on the OnlyFans / Fenix company page.

What the adult web costs

Measured directly from sites’ own join and token-purchase pages. Premium studios cluster tightly — the cheapest tracked monthly plan is $2.49 and the priciest $49.99. Cam sites sell tokens instead; the cheapest tracked rate is $0.111/token.

Full pricing comparison →

The breach ledger

Adult platforms are high-value breach targets. Across the census, 261424603 accounts have been exposed in 11 known breaches of 10 sites — from AdultFriendFinder’s 2016 mega-breach down.

Source: Have I Been Pwned. Trust & safety scorecard →

Access is closing in many places

Adult sites are increasingly blocked or age-gated. OONI network measurements confirm blocking of tracked sites in 17 countries in the last 30 days; separately, 27 US states now have an age-verification law in force, along with the UK, the EU, France and Germany.

Source: OONI. See availability by country and the laws.

Who actually enforces age checks — measured

Beyond the law on paper, we fetch each site from many locations and record what it serves. Where a site returned an age-verification wall or a block notice, out of 763 sites we could measure (294 block datacenter probes entirely):

Measured by Adult Web Census via datacenter proxies; structural detection, corroborated across tries.

Litigation follows the biggest names

The companies behind these sites are heavily litigated — from copyright enforcement to trafficking and data-breach suits. Dockets on record naming the largest litigants:

Source: CourtListener. See all litigation.

Who monetises your visit

The advertising networks that appear most across the tracked sites — a window into the adult-ad ecosystem. Of 1201 sites checked against malware/phishing blocklists, 42 carried a flag:

Detected by rendering each homepage. See the privacy & trackers scorecard.

Where the adult web is hosted

Hosting is clustered on a few networks. Of the 1201 sites fingerprinted, 837 carry a 2257 record-keeping notice and 664 an RTA label on the homepage. The most common hosting networks:

Some of these are internet-old

The earliest-archived domains in the census, by first Internet Archive snapshot:

Ranks as of 2026-10-05; blocking as of 2026-10-05; infrastructure as of 2026-10-05. Methodology and sources on the methodology page.