Tracking the Trackers of Pornographic Websites: The Monetisation Strategies of the Porn Industry

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There is a distinct silence in the discourse of sex, as suggested by Foucault. The irony of modern academia is that while scholars claim to look for truth at all costs, they frame the sexual truth as obscene and untalkable. Indeed, in the digital era, although there are more than 8 million pornography websites on the internet (Ferguson 2003), little research critically studies this enormous landscape of online pornography. Moreover, despite the tremendous amount of revenue that the pornography industry generates – “larger than the combined annual revenues of ABC, NBC, and CBS” (Family Safe 2006) – there is little research that examines this industry’s monetisation mechanism. To fill the aforementioned gaps, it is important to analyse the primary business model of pornographic websites. Maris points out the prevalence of trackers on pornographic websites: “22,484 pornography websites indicated that 93% leak user data to a third party” (2020, 1). Likewise, Vallina asserts that “72% of porn websites use third-party cookie scripts” (2019, 1). More importantly, Vallina finds that most pornographic websites rely on third-party services to monetise their free content (2019, 5). In particular, “advertisement and tracking services (ATS)” account for a large proportion of pornographic websites’ business models (Vallina 2019, 5). These existing studies suggest the need for further exploring the monetisation of trackers on pornographic websites.