The greater accessibility of the World Wide Web from the late 1990s led to an incremental growth of Internet pornography, the use of which among adolescents and adults has since become increasingly popular.
As of 2025[update], a single company, Aylo, owns and operates most of the popular[1] online streaming pornographic websites, including: Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn, as well as pornographic film studios like: Brazzers, Digital Playground, Men.com, Reality Kings, and Sean Cody among others, but it does not own websites like XVideos, xHamster, and XNXX.
[5] The Internet as a medium to access pornography became so popular that in 1995 Time published a cover story titled "Cyberporn".
[11][12] Pornography is regarded by some as one of the driving forces behind the expansion of the World Wide Web, like camcorders, VCRs and cable television before it.
The site soon became restricted to Netherlands only access after traffic grew to over 10,000 users around the world, who were obtaining approximately 30,000 images a day.
Because of the network restrictions of the time, images had to be encoded as ascii text and then broken into sections before being posted to the Alt.binaries of the usenet.
This type of distribution was generally free (apart from fees for Internet access), and provided a great deal of anonymity.
The anonymity made it safe and easy to ignore copyright restrictions, as well as protecting the identity of uploaders and downloaders.
[17][18][19] "Rimm's implication that he might be able to determine 'the percentage of all images available on the Usenet that are pornographic on any given day' was sheer fantasy" wrote Mike Godwin in HotWired.
[22] Godwin recounts the episode in "Fighting a Cyberporn Panic" in his book Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age.
Some free websites primarily serve as portals by keeping up-to-date indexes of these smaller sampler sites.
[23] A common form of adult content is a categorized list (more often a table) of small pictures (called "thumbnails") linked to galleries.
It is still a question which form is more descriptive to a surfer, but many webmasters cite a trend that thumbs are much more productive, and simplify searching.
On the other hand, linklists have a larger amount of unique text, which helps them improve their positions in search engine listings.
As of 2011, the majority of viewers of online pornography were men; women tended to prefer romance novels and erotic fan fiction.
[7] A 2015 study found "a big jump"[28] in pornography viewing over the past few decades, with the largest increase driven by the people born in the 1970s and 1980s.
Webcam content can generally be divided into two categories: group shows offered to members of an adult paysite, and one-on-one private sessions usually sold on a pay-per-view basis.
[30] As of 2020, most so-called cam hosts stream directly from their home, due to the availability of fast Internet and cheap HD webcams.
While pornographic and erotic stories, distributed as text files, web pages, and via message boards and newsgroups, have been semi-popular, audio porn, via formats like MP3 and FLV, have increased in popularity.
[citation needed]Audio porn can include recordings of people having sex or simply reading erotic stories.
This has led to a variety of attempts to restrict children's access to Internet pornography such as the 1996 Communications Decency Act in the United States.
On April 8, 2008 Evil Angel and its owner John Stagliano were charged in federal court with multiple counts of obscenity.
One count was for, "using an interactive computer service to display an obscene movie trailer in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age.
[33] A variety of content-control, parental control and filtering software is available to block pornography and other classifications of material from particular computers or (usually company-owned) networks.
"[34] The production of child pornography has become very profitable, bringing in several billion dollars a year, and is no longer limited to pedophiles.
[35] Philip Jenkins notes that there is "overwhelming evidence that [child pornography] is all but impossible to obtain through nonelectronic means.
In 2006, the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (ICMEC) published a report of findings on the presence of child pornography legislation in the then-184 INTERPOL member countries.
Digital cameras and Internet distribution facilitated by the use of credit cards and the ease of transferring images across national borders has made it easier than ever before for users of child pornography to obtain the photographs and videos.