Pornography is one of, if not, the most common forms of media on the Internet, if you go by the number of websites or amount of data transferred. Despite this fact, Internet pornography is rarely discussed or written about in positive terms. This is somewhat unexpected, given that pornography has spurned many technological advances throughout its history. Many of the advances in video capture and display were driven by the need to make and display pornography better. The desire to purchase pornography on the Internet with more anonymity was one of the ways PayPal drew, and continues to draw, customers to its services. This blog will look into some of the tools being used by some of the more popular Internet pornography sites today. We will be examining the HTML source for some of the largest websites in this industry. The content of this blog will not be explicit, and the intention is not titillation. YouPorn is one of the top 100 accessed websites on the Internet; so, I believe it is relevant to have a serious conversation about the technologies used by these sites. This conversation does not have to be explicit in anyway, and it will not be.
Much of what is in the <head> tag in the YouPorn HTML source is related to loading assets, such as stylesheets. After several <meta> tags, most designed to enhance the website’s SEO, a very large chunk of JavaScript appears. It is hard to say, at this point, whether or not YouPorn is using a common frontend framework, or if this JavaScript was wholly written by a developer somewhere. It certainly was minified before it was sent to the frontend, which is the least you would expect. This script does a variety of things. It handles that lovely popup that occurs as soon as a viewer clicks anywhere on the page; this is handled with vanilla JavaScript. The script also collects a large amount of information about the viewer’s viewing device. This includes information about the operating system, the browser, the device type, device brand, and even some information about the CPU. This information is used to optimize the viewer’s experience. The script also identifies whether or not the viewer is using AdBlock, and then modifies the page as such. Two third-party tools that are in this script are jQuery and AJAX. These two tools would be very necessary for a website that’s main purpose is the display of pornographic content. This is because AJAX can help expedite the movement of the content from backend to frontend, and jQuery can enhance DOM manipulation in order to improve the viewer’s user interface.
AJAX and jQuery can also be seen in the source code of the PornHub website. Again, this is really the least you would expect from a website that serves as much content as any of the porn websites that are currently popular. The source code for these pages show that YouPorn and PornHub both use Google Analytics tools, presumably, to assist in their content targeting. This is a part of how pornography websites begin to grow more and more geared toward a specific viewer over time. PornHub and YouPorn spend a lot of lines of code building what could be considered a profile of their viewers. This way, viewers can see what they want immediately, which ought to enhance their experience and keep them online. xHamster follows a similar template as it identifies information about the user’s device and uses Google Analytics to target the viewer with specific content.
Layout and navigation of any website is important. Although pornography is very desirable to some, websites that display it have so many competitors that they must all try very hard to satisfy their viewers. This makes every detail very important. YouPorn and PornHub appear to use BootStrap as the foundation of their frontend design. There is quite a bit of customization performed by the sites, but BootStrap is still in the foundation. Although it is somewhat less clear, it seems that xHamster also uses BootStrap as its design foundation.
Now, let’s choose a video and see what the source code tells us about what happens when viewers attempt to interact with the content. On PornHub, there are a series of view previews that, when rolled over, a video sprite appears in order to give the viewer a preview of the video. Once the video is clicked on, the viewer is sent to a new page to view the specific video. In the case of PornHub, this is done through the execution of a PHP script that uses the video’s ID and an AJAX request to get the user onto the right page with the right video. Once we are on the video’s page, we can see that PornHub, and probably xHamster and YouPorn as well, are using Flash Video. I am viewing these websites on a MacBook, so it is likely that the video type is different when viewed on a device that does not support Flash Video. This is part of the reason so much information about a viewer’s device is collected upon visiting these websites.
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This short investigation into the tools used by these websites has revealed that, although pornographers have been on the cutting edge of web technology in the past, some of the current pornography providers are using tools that are somewhat unimpressive, or at least run of the mill. That being said, there is never a good reason to reinvent the wheel, and these websites are clearly doing fine in terms of viewership. For the aspiring developers out there, I would take it to heart that some of the most viewed websites on the Internet are using some of the most basic tools to provide their users with content. This confirms what I have often found to be true, that is, getting it done right is far more important than getting it done in a fancy way. I have only scratched the surface of this topic. I hope that others will investigate more into the type of technologies used by this very large portion of the modern Internet.
Erik Kappelman is a transportation modeler for the Montana Department of Transportation. He is also the CEO of Duplovici, a technology consulting and web design company.
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