Youporn

YouPorn is a free pornographic video sharing website, similar in concept, but unrelated to YouTube. Since starting in August 2006, it has become the most popular pornographic website and the 47th most popular website overall as of August 2009. In November 2007, it was reported to be the largest free pornographic website on the Internet.

Concept
YouPorn.com is a video sharing site designed to allow people to upload pornographic videos onto the site, which are then searchable by users to find preferred content. Like many other such video sites, it requires the browser plug-in Flash technology. Uploaded videos are usually available on the site after a few weeks. The content includes segments of commercial pornographic movies, advertising clips for pornographic websites and self-shot amateur videos. In addition, YouPorn features an advanced algorithm that recommends videos to the user based upon the users previous video selections.

YouPorn allows users to download the videos as Flash Video (.flv) files.

This web 2.0 (or porn 2.0) site differs from many other pornographic websites in that it is completely free and ad-supported; in May 2007 it generated a monthly ad revenue of $120,000. YouPorn also operates a chatroom, an online dating service and a porn cam service called YouPornMate.

Ownership
The domain name was registered by a company in December 2005. The site does not list any contact address or say where it is based. Some journalists have speculated that the company is based in Germany. The site is run from a hosting service in Texas. The Terms of Service document explicitly refers to California law.

The company is privately held and there is no public information on the exact names and locations of the owners.

Privacy
YouPorn employs Yahoo!, Google, and Quantcast resources that enable tracking and potential linking to personally identifiable information.

Competition
PornoTube, an earlier pornographic video sharing site that debuted in July 2006 and generated some publicity, has since 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.

Porn 2.0 sites such as these are seen as posing notable competition for paid pornographic websites and traditional magazine and DVD-based pornography.

Criticism and praise
While Porn 2.0 websites like PornoTube and YouPorn have garnered tremendous popularity and interest since their inception, they are not without their critics. Some concern has been raised about the copyright, privacy and legal ramifications of large quantities of free, user-generated, pornographic content on the internet.

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.

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. 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. Similar sentiments have been voiced elsewhere.

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 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". Because the site itself was still accessible from Germany and the other Google versions in the German language (google.at - Austria; google.ch - Switzerland) still listed YouPorn.com, Google Germany's action was sarcastically commented upon in a large number of blogs.

Following a request by a competing pornography service, German provider Arcor categorized YouPorn and a few other porn sites as hardcore pornographic and also 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 19 October 2007 obtained a temporary injunction ordering Arcor to resume limiting the accessibility to YouPorn.com. On 23 October 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.

Malaysia/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".

Sri Lanka
In July 2009 Sri Lanka blocked access to 12 porn web sites including YouPorn, RedTube, Xvideos and Xhamster. On 25 July 2009 Sri Lanka Chief Magistrate Nishantha Hapuarachchi ordered the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission to block those 12 websites from all local Internet Service Providers.