On August 31, 2026, Mashable published reporting from associate features editor Anna Iovine documenting an unexpected second-order effect of the U.S. age-verification wave: adult retailers and distributors are seeing measurable growth in DVD sales. David Eliason, who owns three adult stores in South Dakota — Dick & Jane's Naughty Spot in Sturgis and Rapid City, and Bonnie & Clyde's Adult Supercenter in Rapid City — told Mashable that his DVD business is "up probably 20, 22 percent this year over the last year," and offered a blunt causal read: "There's really no other explanation other than [that] South Dakota passed an age verification bill."

Why It Matters

For anyone modeling the adult and sextech commerce stack, this is a rare piece of *hard sales data* on where demand goes when a compliance wall goes up. Everything else in the age-verification debate has been directional — VPN download spikes, traffic declines, survey sentiment. A 20-plus percent year-over-year lift in a dying physical format, clocked independently by a brick-and-mortar retailer and a national distributor, is a receipt. Three implications. First, for retail: adult brick-and-mortar stores, long assumed to be in terminal decline against streaming, now have a defensible niche in AV states — one that also happens to move high-margin inventory alongside pleasure products, which is where those stores actually make money. Second, for platforms: the leakage is not just to VPNs and offshore tube sites but out of the digital channel entirely, which means the compliant, moderated, monetizable platforms are absorbing the cost of the regime while an untracked cash-and-carry channel absorbs the demand. Third, for policymakers: a law designed to interpose friction between minors and explicit content is measurably pushing adults toward a distribution format with *no* age gate at the point of consumption beyond a store clerk's judgment — the exact analog control the statutes were written to modernize past. The privacy logic driving this is worth naming plainly, because it will keep showing up in adjacent categories. Consumers are not rejecting age verification because they object to proving they are adults; they are rejecting the creation of a permanent, linkable record connecting their legal identity to their sexual interests. Physical media solves that problem the old-fashioned way. Expect the same instinct to surface in connected-device privacy fights and in the device-level age-signal debate that the FSC has been pushing as its preferred alternative.

The pattern is not isolated to one state or one retailer. Lewis Adams, director of sales at Pulse Distribution — which handles home video, broadcast, internet and wireless distribution for roughly 90 percent of adult studios including Brazzers and Reality Kings, per Adams — told Mashable the company has "seen a bump in DVD orders from the states that are enforcing online AV laws," naming Tennessee, Texas and Florida as the clearest examples. Pulse sells to wholesalers rather than consumers, so its own operations are unchanged by the statutes; what it sees is the demand signal moving downstream. Adams stopped short of predicting a full revival but expects DVD sales to persist for a long time, citing the surveillance argument directly: "We all know that everything you watch online is tracked."

The context is a regulatory regime that has now reached critical mass. Age-verification requirements are in effect across roughly half of U.S. states — third-party checks typically requiring a credit card, an ID upload, or a face scan — plus the UK, France and Italy, with parallel machinery being built for social-media age gates in Australia and under consideration in the EU. Mashable notes that Ofcom, a year into UK enforcement, found many pornography sites still lack age checks and that minors can reach them through search. A June 2026 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper cited in the piece found time spent on adult sites fell roughly 10 percent, with viewers shifting to noncompliant sites or routing around the checks with VPNs.

Free Speech Coalition public policy director Mike Stabile — the industry's most quoted voice on this beat, and the same person quoted in Missouri's enforcement coverage the same week — framed the DVD data as vindication of a long-standing prediction: "I've been hearing consumers threaten to return to physical media since the laws first started passing, and it's interesting to hear retailers clock it in the sales data." His broader assessment was harsher: "It's hard to express what a monumental failure these online age-verification laws have been. There has been almost no consumer compliance. People have shifted to foreign sites and pirate sites, they're trading porn on Discord and Telegram, they're using VPNs."

Sources

Update — 2026-09-01

{Initial entry — story first created.}