Age verification legislation is tanking traffic to sites that comply, and rewarding those that don't

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So much for horny jail.

The AgeAware demonstration video on an iPhone.
(Image credit: Ageaware, Future)

A new report suggests that the UK's age verification measures may be having unforeseen knock-on effects on web traffic, with the real winners being sites that flout the law entirely.

Web users in the UK will likely be familiar with the new measures: a lot of my usual social media haunts now require age verification to even let me look at my direct messages as part of the Online Safety Act's stipulations. I swear that's the real reason I've not been getting back to folks in my direct messages—and not, you know, the usual excuse of a mix of overwhelm and straightforward forgetfulness. Social apps aside, many genuinely adult websites are restricting access too.

Sure, there are ways around this if you'd rather not feed your personal data to a platform's third-party age verification vendor. However, sites are seeing more significant consequences beyond just locking you out of your DMs. For a start, The Washington post reports web traffic to pornography sites implementing age verification has taken a totally predictable hit—but those flouting the new age check requirements have seen traffic as much as triple compared to the same time last year.

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The Washington Post looked at the 90 most visited porn sites based on UK visitor data from Similarweb. Of the 90 total sites, 14 hadn't yet deployed 'scan your face' age checks. The publication found that while traffic from British IP addresses to sites requiring age verification had cratered, the 14 sites without age checks "have been rewarded with a flood of traffic" from UK-based users.

It's worth noting that VPN usage might distort the the location data of users. Still, such a surge of traffic likely brings with it a surge in income in the form of ad-revenue. Ofcom, the UK's government-approved regulatory communications office overseeing everything from TV to the internet, may have something to say about that though. Meanwhile, sites that comply with the rules are not only losing out on ad-revenue, but are also expected to pay for the legally required age verification services on top.

The UK regulator is already investigating "four companies which collectively run 34 pornography sites" on the grounds of whether the "providers have highly effective age checks in place to protect children from encountering pornography." That means that the days of a web traffic feeding frenzy for porn sites flouting the Online Safety Act's age verification requirements could be numbered—well, if Ofcom can do anything about the clone and mirror sites that will inevitably crop up.

The Yoti homepage on an iPhone.

(Image credit: Yoti, Future)

Alright, stop snickering about the mental image of someone perusing porn sites professionally, and let me tell you why this is important. You may have already read that while a lot of Brits support the age verification measures broadly speaking, a sizable portion feels they've been implemented poorly. Indeed, a lot of the aforementioned sites that complied with the law also criticised it by linking to a petition seeking its repeal. The UK government has responded to this petition by saying it has "no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act" despite, at time of writing, over 500,000 signatures urging it to do just that.

But age verification checks aren't just a thing for Brits desperate for steamy Baldur's Gate 3 mods to worry about. For instance, the US state of Mississippi has implemented a similar law to protect "minor children from online harmful material and access to such material." This requires sites to both verify new users' age, and acquire parental consent for users who are "known minors" under the age of 18. But here's the kicker—the law also requires sites to "make commercially reasonable efforts" to insulate under age users from harmful online content.

Even if money was no object, anyone that's spent any amount of time online will know that's a big ask. As such, Bluesky has decided to simply block Mississippi-based users. TechCrunch report that Mastodon has also begun to do the same as the smaller-scale social media site shared in a statement that it does not “have the means to apply age verification.”

Australia has also recently carried out a study into age assurance technology, which concluded that it can be rolled out in the country "privately, efficiently and effectively."

As age verification measures proliferate, the internet as you know it may be about to get even smaller.

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Jess Kinghorn
Jess Kinghorn
Hardware Writer

Jess has been writing about games for over ten years, spending the last seven working on print publications PLAY and Official PlayStation Magazine. When she’s not writing about all things hardware here, she’s getting cosy with a horror classic, ranting about a cult hit to a captive audience, or tinkering with some tabletop nonsense.

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All Comments

    1. Comment by Kane Marshall.

      Were one step away from China and no one is doing anything

      • Comment by Hyzer Soze.

        We are all slowly becoming more and more like China every year with constant monitoring, data mining and logging, censorship, and control of information...

        • Reply by Short Stack.

          This is a friendly reminder to delete your commet. Before they send people to arrest you for your opinion.

      • Comment by mazz0.

        Before this law was brought in the government should have set up a system for age verification so users don't have to trust unknown third parties. I'm thinking a government owned but *independently run* not-for-profit, using open-source software so everyone can be confident they're not secretly monitoring your activities.

        • Comment by Helium Freak.

          I wont use any sites that require age verification, i dont care about the internet that much.

          • Comment by Bob Sherunkle.

            Freedoms being slowly diminished from under us, the majority of society are akin to the boiling frog scenario - soon it'll be too late and we'll all be encapsulated in that rolling boil, puzzled and asking how it came about. Hello the authoritarian future ?

            • Reply by Helium Freak.

              This is the labor goverment that everyone voted for

            • Reply by Obsidian76.

              The LINO (Labour In Name Only) didnt bring the OSA 2023 in, that was the previous govt who passed the law. Implementation for online verification was delayed partly so OFCOM could get its act together but also allow the platforms to implement a system. BTW LINO got 33% of the vote in 2024 on a 60% turnout so in no way did everyone or even a majority of the electorate vote for them.

          • Comment by Gordon Hawks.

            UK has poised itself to be one of the first developed countries to invent internet censorship like seen in China. As far as I know, sites are not obliged by law to block UK traffic by default, and UK gets in touch "yeah, your site is not cool. please do not let our british citizens in" or the other way around, block the access to said sites from Uk themselves, that is basically act of censorship.

            What age to be alive. We moved from barely no freedoms, build our freedoms for over centuries, and now those same freedoms are getting trampled right back into middle ages again.

            All in guise of "would someone think of the children!" mantra. Issue is, if someones kid is watching porn, it is their failure as parent, not failure of the state. That's like saying if someone gets hit by a car while jaywalking, it's the government fault. What are we gonna do? Build electric fences around the roads?

            • Reply by reganator5000.

              maybe not the government's fault, but it likely is the ISPs - they were tasked with inventing and making effective parental controls in order to stop kids accessing adult content decades ago, and what they came up with just doesn't work. And then the government made it essentially mandatory for kids to have internet access for multiple years (for good reasons, but it still happened), so the actually functional way of stopping kids getting at adult content (removing their ability to connect with the internet) was actually banned by law. School and corporate IT departments find it hard to prevent access on closed networks they're actively monitoring, so the problem with telling parents to handle it is that it's similar to the advice of 'if you want your kid to do well in life, find an hitherto undiscovered gold deposit' - yeah, it would be a good solution, but fails to be particularly practical.

            • Reply by Obsidian76.

              We have had Internet Censorship in the UK for along time, Internet service providers can be required to block access to a domain at network level for UK based users with a simple court order. A certain sailing ship site was routinely being blocked at a network level as a result of court orders, it became quite the game of wack a mole.