Did Removing 80% Of It's Content Impact PornHub? - Dan Taylor
May 2020 Core Update
pornhub.com Competitive Analysis, Marketing Mix and Traffic - Alexa
xhamster.com Competitive Analysis, Marketing Mix and Traffic - Alexa
xvideos.com Competitive Analysis, Marketing Mix and Traffic - Alexa
xnxx.com Competitive Analysis, Marketing Mix and Traffic - Alexa
youporn.com Competitive Analysis, Marketing Mix and Traffic - Alexa
redtube.com Competitive Analysis, Marketing Mix and Traffic - Alexa
May 2021 Update
So, given I published the original section of this post a month after the content removal, I thought it would be good to look at how the content removal has affected things a few months on, and whether or not the market has changed in terms of search visibility and dominance.
So let’s take a look at the organic search visibility for the most popular adult tube sites (according to third-party websites that track and rank this sort of thing) between January 2020 and March 2021.
Organic Search Visibility for Adult Tube Sites
So, as a primer for this data – the May 4th, 2020 Google update had a significant impact on the adult sector, across not only tube video websites, but also specialist websites, niche websites, and independent publishers.
So around this time, both PornHub and XNXX saw increases, which mathematically also closened the gap between the two websites.
Conversely, YouPorn saw a decline, and RedTube for all intents and purposes just appears to be plodding along with a steady growth rate, seemingly agnostic of all the chaos going on around them.
As I covered in the original section of this post, removing 80% of their content did impact PornHubs traffic. I feel that’s an obvious conclusion between cause and effect, but the wider impact for me is that XNXX has made up the ground.
This isn’t all down to PornHub’s content cull, but also a testament to the fact that XNXX over the past two years (speculatively) have invested so that they’ve not only benefitted from the May 4th algorithm update but then been in a strong enough position to capitalize on PornHub’s deoptimizations.
If we look at the competitor research graph in Semrush, we can see that XNXX (and XVideos, which weirdly isn’t considered a top-10 tube site by the sources I used to compile this list and therefore didn’t pull data on) also shows considerable data versus PornHub and XNXX.
Adult Tube Site Competitor Graph: Semrush
So, as a second update to this post – did removing 80% of their content impact their (PornHub’s) performance? Yes, and competitors are now beginning to compete at the same level for users.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhVQ1nHN7JU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdaH73fD5dY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z99IjOUj7x4