Pornhub finds itself in a 'sticky' situation, and after already being banned in a third of all US states, the rollout could be spreading across the globe. With Similarweb data from April 2025 claiming Pornhub is the 19th-most-visited website in the world and the most-visited adult website, there's no escaping the fact that millions of you are regularly logging on for a bit of NSFW entertainment between the sheets.
Following the January 2025 ban of Pornhub in Florida, concerns about age verification and requiring users to prove they're old enough to visit to the adult site could be about to make a major dint in Pornhub's traffic.
Aylo is the parent company that owns sites including Pornhub, YouPorn, and RedTube, but for those in France, they'll have to get their rocks off another way.
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According to Politico, Pornhub is taking a further stand against a new law that requires porn companies to verify the ages of its visitors. Although the deadline for these new checks is June 7, Pornhub's French site is starting to go dark for its 68 million residents from June 4.
From June 7, adult websites are required to verify a user's age with a credit card or a government-issued ID document. France’s law demands that sites like Pornhub provide age verification from a third party, although Aylo argues that this puts someone's information in danger of being hacked or leaked.
Private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners bought Aylo in 2023, with partner Solomon Friedman telling reporters how the new law is both 'ineffective' and 'dangerous' while echoing its privacy concerns: "It’s a matter of putting our values first, and that means communicating directly with the French people to tell them what their government is refusing to tell them."
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Aylo has argued that countries should be targeting operating system developers like Microsoft, Apple, and Google instead of porn platforms.
Friedman reiterated: "Google, Apple and Microsoft all have the capability built into their operating system to verify the age of the user at the operating system or device level."
He suggests that supplying an age signal to any site or app gets around the privacy risk of users sharing their sensitive data with multiple sites.
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Alongside a message telling users how Aylo "is communicating directly with the French people to tell them how dangerous, how potentially privacy-infringing, and how ineffective the French law is," visitors will be greeted by an image of Eugene Delacroix's bare-breasted "Liberty Leading the People".
France’s Minister of State for Digital Affairs, Clara Chappaz, has clapped back at Aylo on X and accused the company of lying about the laws: "Adults are free to consume porn, but not at the expense of protecting our children. Asking pornographic sites to verify the age of their users is not about stigmatizing adults, but about protecting our children."
Culture Minister Aurore Berge also thanked Aylo for its defiance, saying that cutting off access was a better solution to complying with age verification and adding: "There will be less violent, degrading and humiliating content accessible to minors in France."