YouPorn
 | |
Screenshot
File:YouPorncom.png Screenshot of YouPorn home page. | |
| Type of business | Pornographic |
|---|---|
Type of site | Pornographic video sharing |
| Available in | English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Turkish, Polish and Russian |
| Founded | August 2006 |
| Headquarters | Los Angeles, California , U.S. |
| Owner | Manwin |
| URL | YouPorn.com |
| Registration | Optional |
| Current status | Active |
YouPorn is a free pornographic video sharing website and one of the 100 most accessed websites in the world. Since launching in August 2006, it grew to become the most popular pornographic website on the internet, and, in November 2007, it was reported to be the largest free pornographic website as well.[2] As of February 2013, it was the 83rd most popular website overall and the fifth most popular pornographic website. In the category of pornographic websites, it was surpassed in the rankings by competitor sites Xhamster, XVideos and Pornhub, as well as the adult webcam site, LiveJasmin.[3]
This Web 2.0 (or Porn 2.0) site differs from many other pornographic websites in that it is completely free and ad-supported. One journalist reported that in May 2007 it generated a monthly ad revenue of $120,000 and that it was owned by Stephen Paul Jones.[4]
Ownership
The domain name was registered by a company in December 2005.[5] YouPorn's own site reports that its owner is Midstream Media International N.V., seated in Willemstad, the capital city of Curaçao, an island in the southern Caribbean Sea that forms a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.[6] Sunny Freeman, a reporter pursuing a graduate degree in journalism at UBC, wrote one article in The Tyee calling the company "German-based".[7] The site is run from a hosting service in Texas.
In 2011, YouPorn was purchased by the adult-entertainment and IT company Manwin, owners of other popular pornographic websites such as Pornhub and SpankWire based in Luxembourg.[8]
Privacy
YouPorn employs Yahoo!, Google, and Quantcast resources that enable tracking and potential linking to personally identifiable information.[citation needed]
Competition
PornoTube, an earlier pornographic video sharing site that debuted in July 2006 and generated some publicity, had been overtaken in popularity by YouPorn,[9] which debuted in August 2006.[10] As of October 2007, YouPorn was the highest-ranked adult website according to Alexa, ranging in the top 35 globally visited sites. In the same year the site was adding 15 million new users each month.[11] Several other websites now use a similar concept; some serve only videos in a specific category. Several other sites collect and index links to the videos hosted on these sites. Some of the main rivals of YouPorn are Xtube, Redtube, Pornhub etc.
Porn 2.0 sites such as these are seen as posing notable competition for paid pornographic websites and traditional magazine and DVD-based pornography.[4][12][13]
Criticism and praise
 | This article's "criticism" or "controversy" section may compromise the article's neutrality. (October 2010) |
YouPorn consumes more than three terabytes of bandwidth each day, which has caused the site to go down at times due to the sheer volume of users and the large file size of the videos. When the online version of a German newspaper reported on YouPorn in November 2006, the site could not deal with the traffic surge, went down temporarily, and asked its users for an unmetered service provider in Europe.[14]
Concerns have also surfaced over the inability to verify the age of the persons depicted in the videos, the possibility of copyrighted videos being uploaded to the site, and the possibility of privacy violations when private sex tapes are uploaded without the consent of all involved parties.[7] In 2007 Vivid Entertainment took legal action against YouPorn, claiming that the streaming of copyrighted material was depriving it of revenue.[11]
YouPorn has been called "a good role model for the sexually naive", as many of its homemade videos depict amateur couples having ordinary sex (known as "Amateur"), as opposed to the often unreal scenarios of commercial porn.[15]
Court papers filed by a class action law firm, Fears and Nachawati, in the Central District of California show that that on December 6, 2010 two men filed a class action lawsuit against Netherlands-based Midstream Media N.V., owners of YouPorn, claiming the company’s sites use “history-sniffing” technology to hijack users’ personal information.[6]
Blocking
Germany
German law does not allow hardcore pornography without an effective age verification system, and the German Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien (Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons) placed YouPorn on its index. As a result, since April 2007, the German site of the Google search engine (google.de) classified YouPorn.com as a hardcore pornography website[16] and replaced it with a link to Chilling Effects, claiming that a "German regulatory body reported illegal material".[17]
Following a request by Kirchberg, a competing pornography service,[18] German provider Arcor categorized YouPorn and a few other porn sites as hardcore pornographic and also blocked access to the website at the routing level in September 2007,[19] affecting over 2 million users. The German Pirate Party promptly opened a proxy server so that Arcor customers could continue to easily access YouPorn.
Arcor lifted the block on September 17 because the IP address-based filter which had been set up for YouPorn also affected other sites.[20] Kirchberg then sued, alleging that Arcor aided unfair competition by YouPorn, and on October 19, 2007 obtained a temporary injunction ordering Arcor to resume limiting the accessibility to YouPorn.com.[21][22] On October 23, 2007, Arcor started to control access to YouPorn again, this time with a DNS-based approach that is easily circumvented,[23] and successfully filed an appeal against the injunction.[24]
Kirchberg has sent notices to 19 German ISPs demanding that YouPorn be granted access limitations, but none have complied.[25] Efforts by Kirchberg to obtain injunctions regarding YouPorn from internet providers in Kiel and Düsseldorf were unsuccessful.[26][27]
Singapore
In May 2008 it was reported that Singapore had blocked access to YouPorn and RedTube, in what a government officials described as "a symbolic statement".[28]
Sri Lanka
In July 2009 Sri Lanka blocked access to 12 porn web sites including YouPorn, RedTube, Xvideos and Xhamster. On July 25, 2009 Sri Lanka Chief Magistrate Nishantha Hapuarachchi ordered the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission to block those 12 websites from all local Internet Service Providers.[29][30]
See also
References
- ^ "Youporn.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved April 1, 2014.
- ^ "Special Report with Brit Hume." Broadcast: November 21, 2007
- ^ "Alexa Global 500". Alexa Internet, Inc., an Amazon company. Retrieved February 7, 2013.
- ^ a b Obscene Losses, Portfolio, October 15, 2007
- ^ Warum zeigen immer mehr Menschen ihre privaten Sexfilme im Internet?, Bild.de, November 14, 2006. Template:De icon
- ^ a b YouPorn.com Hit With 'History-Sniffing' Lawsuit, XBIZ, December 6, 2010
- ^ a b Porn 2.0, and Its Victims, The Tyee, July 6, 2007
- ^ Manwin Acquires YouPorn.com – AVN ID, created October 20, 2007
- ^ Comparison of YouPorn and PornoTube traffic Alexa.com
- ^ "Alexa traffic details for youporn.com". Alexa.com. Retrieved December 8, 2010.
- ^ a b "Home porn gives industry the blues", guardian.co.uk, December 16, 2007. Retrieved March 4, 2009.
- ^ Purveyors of porn scramble to keep up with Internet, USA Today, June 5, 2007
- ^ YouTube with fewer clothes, The Times, June 19, 2007
- ^ Bild.de verursacht Pornowelle, November 15, 2006. Template:De icon
- ^ A good role model for the sexually naive, The Times, September 24, 2007
- ^ Search results for "youporn" on google.de delivering many comments from blogs
- ^ "German regulatory body reported illegal material — Chilling Effects Clearinghouse". Chillingeffects.org. Retrieved December 8, 2010.
- ^ Konrad Lischka (October 22, 2007). "Jugendschutz: Abmahnwelle drängt Internetanbieter zur Web-Zensur". Der Spiegel (in German).
{{cite news}}: Unknown parameter|trans_title=ignored (|trans-title=suggested) (help) - ^ Arcor blocks access to porno pages,[dead link] Heise Online, September 11, 2007
- ^ Arcor sperrt Youporn.com Template:De icon
- ^ Landgericht zwingt Arcor zur Porno-Zensur, Spiegel Online, October 19, 2007. Template:De icon
- ^ Arcor muss YouPorn sperren, Heise Online, October 19, 2007. Template:De icon
- ^ Arcor blockiert Zugang zu Youporn, Spiegel Online, October 23, 2007. Template:De icon
- ^ Heise.de: Arcor muss YouPorn nicht mehr sperren. Heise.de, April 15, 2008. Template:De icon
- ^ Abmahnwelle drängt Internetanbieter zur Web-Zensur, Spiegel Online, October 22, 2007. Template:De icon
- ^ Golem.de: Gericht: Provider muss keine Pornoseiten sperren, September 23, 2007. Template:De icon
- ^ Weiterer Antrag auf Sperrung von Pornoseiten zurückgewiesen, Heise Online, December 13, 2007. Template:De icon
- ^ Singapore bans two porn websites in symbolic move, Reuters, May 23, 2008
- ^ Sri Lankan court blocks porn websites, India Express, July 25, 2009
- ^ Sri Lanka court blocks porn websites, Brisbane Times, Australia, July 25, 2009