Video Workload Characteristics of Online Porn: Perspectives from a Major Video Streaming Service

Adult video content is considered to be responsible for a major portion of the Internet traffic. We present a preliminary characterization study of one of the largest and popular adult streaming service, xHamster. While there have been extensive analysis of mainstream user generated content sharing services such as YouTube, adult streaming services have been an underappreciated field of study for researchers. Using metadata of over 1.8 million videos we studied the video characteristics, user interaction, and popularity dynamics of xHamster. We observe that adult services garner more views per video than YouTube. Adult streaming sites tend to have longer videos compared to mainstream streaming sites. In adult streaming services it is common for videos to be assigned multiple categories.