PornHub, YouPorn Join the Secured Ranks With HTTPS

BURBANK, Calif. — Two of the internet's most popular adult tube sites are joining the secured ranks.

PornHub.com, the behemoth tube site with its 75 million daily visitors, has already switched over to HTTPS. Its sister site, YouPorn.com, will turn on HTTPS by default on April 4.

Both sites are owned and operated by adult entertainment conglomerate MindGeek.

HTTPS, discussed in-depth at January’s XBIZ Show, provides authentication of the website and associated servers and protects against man-in-the-middle attacks.

With HTTPS, users see a green padlock in the upper left-hand corner of their browsers, indicating a secured view where others can’t see what they are looking at.

Web technology experts for years have said that without the secure protocol, adult sites of all sizes have suffered security breaches that have resulted in pirated content, exposed user databases and millions of dollars in lost income.

Eric Paul Leue, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, said that when the adult trade group hosted its HTTPS panel during the XBIZ Show, "we saw tremendous interest from producers, many of whom assumed the process of moving to secure HTTPS platforms would be cumbersome and expensive."

"Thanks to our partnerships with Mozilla and the Center for Democracy and Technology, adult webmasters have been able to speed up the transition process, increase loading speeds and ensure themselves against lowered search rankings for unsecured sites," Leue told XBIZ. "We encourage any members who have not made the switch to contact us and find out how."

MindGeek owns a handful of the internet’s top adult tube sites besides PornHub and YouPorn.

It operates RedTube, SpankWire.com, KeezMovies, Tube8.com and ExtremeTube.com, as well.

The Burbank, Calif., company hasn’t indicated whether HTTPS will be incorporated with those sites.