Pornhub lost over a million visitors each day after 'porn ban' became law

It's been over two weeks now since the UK's 'porn ban' was first introduced and the adult industry is suffering big time.

Pornhub, long regarded as the number one site for sexual content online, has lost a significant number of daily visitors to its website since the online safety act was officially implemented on 25 July.

If you haven't tried to get on an adult site in the last two weeks, then good for you, because pornography is actually doing a huge amount of damage to people's mental state and often even their sex lives.

But you perhaps won't have seen the new legislations in place, which mean that UK visitors must verify that they are over the age of 18, by uploading a photo and their details onto the website, which naturally is putting a lot of people off.

While the new laws were brought in to prevent children from accessing explicit content online, it's having the added effect of stopping a lot of adults as well, even with plenty finding a loophole which allows them to access the exact same content they did a few weeks ago.

Visitors aren't keen to upload their details to the site (Jack Taylor/Getty Images)

Data experts at Similarweb have studied the numbers from the past two weeks and found that Pornhub's daily numbers have dropped by a massive 47 per cent between 24 July and 8 August.

The number of average daily visits to Pornhub fell from 3.2 million in July to 2 million in the first week of August. Unfortunately, the study also found that unregulated sites were experiencing an increase in traffic, which means that those looking for adult content online and now simply accessing it away from the mainstream, where they may be subject to far more extreme content.

A spokesperson for Pornhub told the BBC: "As we've seen in many jurisdictions around the world, there is often a drop in traffic for compliant sites and an increase in traffic for non-compliant sites."

Adult websites who don't comply will be hit with huge fines (Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

These websites, if discovered by OFCOM, will face some serious sanctions, as failure to comply with the new rules means that sites and their owners run the risk of being fined £18 million or 10 per cent of their revenue.

Alex Kekesi, who is the Brand and Community head at Aylo - the parent company of Pornhub - previously told LADbible about the negative impact of the new bill, which has nothing to do with website numbers.

He said: "We know that when people choose not to age verify, they do not stop looking for adult content, they migrate to those irresponsible platforms.

"We continue to believe that to make the internet safer for everyone, every phone, tablet or computer should start as a kid-safe device.

"Only verified adults should unlock access to things like dating apps, gambling, or adult content.

"This is the core premise of device- based age verification, which we believe is the safest and most effective option for protecting children and maintaining user privacy online."

LADbible has contacted Pornhub for comment.