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. 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. The site is completely free and ad-supported, with estimated monthly ad revenue of $120,000 in 2007.
Ownership
The domain name was registered by a company in December 2005. 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. Sunny Freeman, a reporter pursuing a graduate degree in journalism at UBC, wrote one article in The Tyee calling the company "German-based". 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.
Competition
PornoTube, an earlier pornographic video sharing site that debuted in July 2006 and generated some publicity, had been overtaken in popularity by YouPorn, which debuted in August 2006. 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. 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, and Pornhub all of which are part of the Mindgeek Group. Porn 2.0 sites such as these are seen as posing notable competition for paid pornographic websites and traditional magazine and DVD-based pornography.
Bandwidth
As of 2012, ExtremeTech reported YouPorn transferred an average of 950 TB per day, up from a reported figure of 3 TB per day in 2006.
Response
Concerns have 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. In 2007 Vivid Entertainment took legal action against YouPorn, claiming that the streaming of copyrighted material was depriving it of revenue. YouPorn has been called "a good role model for the sexually naive", as many of its homemade videos depict amateur couples having ordinary sex, as opposed to the often unreal scenarios of commercial porn.
Blocking
Germany
German law does not allow hardcore pornography without an effective age verification system, and the German Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien placed YouPorn on its index. As a result, since April 2007, the German site of the Google search engine classified YouPorn.com as a hardcore pornography website and replaced it with a link to Chilling Effects, claiming that a "German regulatory body reported illegal material". Following a request by Kirchberg, a competing pornography service, 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, 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. 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. On October 23, 2007, Arcor started to control access to YouPorn again, this time with a DNS-based approach that is easily circumvented, and successfully filed an appeal against the injunction. Kirchberg has sent notices to 19 German ISPs demanding that YouPorn be granted access limitations, but none have complied. Efforts by Kirchberg to obtain injunctions regarding YouPorn from internet providers in Kiel and Düsseldorf were unsuccessful.
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".
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.
History
Viewers
As of 2009, three of the largest porn sites "RedTube, YouPorn, and Pornhub -- collectively make up 100 million unique visitors".
Team YP
YouPorn sponsors an esports team known as Team YP. In July 2014, YouPorn stated their intentions to enter the professional esports scene by sponsoring either a Dota 2 or League of Legends team. On December 3, 2014, YouPorn announced their official entry into the Dota 2 scene with the acquisition of a Spanish team previously known as Play2Win. On June 9, 2015 Team YP announced that they had signed Super Smash Bros. player Jason "Bizzarro Flame" Yoon. Team YP's Street Fighter division consists of Valentin "Valmaster" Petit and Anton "Filipin0man" Herrera with the former being signed on September 23 and the latter being signed on October 8. In October 2015, Team YP announced they were searching for a team. They stated they wanted one all-male and one all-female team. On November 13, 2015, Team YP signed Team Phenomenon and New Era as their all-male and all-female teams respectively. As of June 2019, Team YP is not sponsoring any players. Team YP formerly had teams competing in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, League of Legends, Overwatch, Street Fighter, and Super Smash Bros..
