TY - GEN

T1 - Demystifying porn 2.0

T2 - ACM Internet Measurement Conference

AU - Tyson, Gareth

AU - Elkhatib, Yehia

AU - Sastry, Nishanth

AU - Uhlig, Steve

PY - 2013/10

Y1 - 2013/10

N2 - The Internet has recently evolved into a huge video delivery infrastructure, with websites such as YouTube and Netflix appearing at the top of most traffic measurement studies. However, most traffic studies have largely kept silent about an area of the Internet that (even today) is poorly understood: adult media distribution. Whereas ten years ago, such services were provided primarily via peer-to-peer file sharing and bespoke websites, recently these have converged towards what is known as "Porn 2.0". This has seen popular web portals emerging that allow users to upload, view, rate and comment videos for free. Despite this, we still lack even a basic understanding of how users interact with these services. This paper seeks to address this gap by performing the first large-scale measurement study of one of the most popular Porn 2.0 websites: YouPorn. We have repeatedly crawled the website to collect statistics about 183k videos consisting of footage spanning in excess of 3 years, witnessing over 60 billion views. Through this, we offer the first characterisation of this type of corpus, highlighting the nature of YouPorn's repository (e.g. injection rates, ratings etc.). Alongside this, we also inspect the popularity of objects and how they relate to other features such as the categories to which they belong. We find evidence to suggest a high level of flexibility in the interests of its user base, manifested in the extremely rapid decay of content popularity over time, as well as high susceptibility to browsing order. Using a small-scale user study, we validate some of our findings and explore the infrastructure design and management implications of our observations.

AB - The Internet has recently evolved into a huge video delivery infrastructure, with websites such as YouTube and Netflix appearing at the top of most traffic measurement studies. However, most traffic studies have largely kept silent about an area of the Internet that (even today) is poorly understood: adult media distribution. Whereas ten years ago, such services were provided primarily via peer-to-peer file sharing and bespoke websites, recently these have converged towards what is known as "Porn 2.0". This has seen popular web portals emerging that allow users to upload, view, rate and comment videos for free. Despite this, we still lack even a basic understanding of how users interact with these services. This paper seeks to address this gap by performing the first large-scale measurement study of one of the most popular Porn 2.0 websites: YouPorn. We have repeatedly crawled the website to collect statistics about 183k videos consisting of footage spanning in excess of 3 years, witnessing over 60 billion views. Through this, we offer the first characterisation of this type of corpus, highlighting the nature of YouPorn's repository (e.g. injection rates, ratings etc.). Alongside this, we also inspect the popularity of objects and how they relate to other features such as the categories to which they belong. We find evidence to suggest a high level of flexibility in the interests of its user base, manifested in the extremely rapid decay of content popularity over time, as well as high susceptibility to browsing order. Using a small-scale user study, we validate some of our findings and explore the infrastructure design and management implications of our observations.

KW - adult websites

KW - internet measurement

KW - video streaming

KW - porn 2.0

U2 - 10.1145/2504730.2504739

DO - 10.1145/2504730.2504739

M3 - Conference contribution/Paper

SN - 9781450319539

SP - 417

EP - 426

BT - http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2504730.2504739

PB - ACM

CY - New York

Y2 - 23 October 2013 through 25 October 2013

ER -