On October 28–29, 2026, WIRED and Tubefilter reported that Pornhub (owned by Aylo) has started a campaign inviting performers and creators to upload safe-for-work content (cooking, gaming, podcasts, outdoor and how-to videos) and earn money from it alongside their adult catalogs. In the campaign spot, a mother fixes a flat tire using a how-to video from adult performer Natassia Dreams. According to WIRED, Pornhub says its podcast and gaming categories grew by triple digits in 2025, podcasts alone by 327%, and searches for "SFW" rose 114%. Non-explicit videos will appear across video pages, search, recommendations, categories and Shorties, Pornhub's vertical-video feed. Creators can link them to Pornhub's premium subscription.

Why It Matters

The model of going dark in protest has been costly. Aylo gave up its largest U.S. markets while non-compliant competitors absorbed the traffic. A SFW layer lets Pornhub return to blocked states as a general video platform, rebuild audience habits and keep creators earning in places where explicit content stays behind a geo-block or ID gate. It also puts Pornhub in competition with OnlyFans' own SFW push and with YouTube and TikTok for deplatformed creators. Regulators may test whether a "general audience" adult brand can reopen without verification. Expect state AGs to scrutinize whether the SFW-only experience really keeps explicit content out of reach, especially with the [Quebec class action](/stories/quebec-pornhub-600m-class-action) and [Ofcom's device-level age-check probe](/stories/ofcom-aylo-device-age-checks-probe) still open.

The bigger business detail is in WIRED's report. Pornhub had blocked access in 23 U.S. states to protest age-verification mandates. Now that SFW content is available in many of them, WIRED reports only four states — Indiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas — remain blocked. WIRED also reports that nearly 80% of Pornhub's UK viewership has disappeared since the Online Safety Act's age checks took effect. Early numbers are promising for some creators. Isla Moon told WIRED one of her SFW survival videos has drawn about three times more views on Pornhub than on YouTube. "Pornhub is and always will be a porn site that supports sex workers," said Alex Kekesi, Pornhub's VP of brand and community. "But that doesn't mean porn is the only content that belongs here."

New research shows why traffic is the pressure point. A Chicago Booth Review summary published October 29 of an NBER working paper by Matthew Brown, Emily Davis and Devin Pope, using Comscore data on about 500,000 U.S. users, found that state age-verification laws cut overall porn consumption by only about 10% in the first eight weeks but cut Pornhub's by 54%. For every 100 hours previously spent on porn, about 50 moved to non-compliant sites and about 30 to VPN circumvention.

Sources

Update — 2026-10-30

Initial entry — story first created.

Update — 2026-11-01

From Minecraft to the midterms: Pornhub runs its first public-interest ads. As reported by The Washington Post (Anna Liss-Roy, Oct 31, 2026) and excerpted by The Corsair, Hot2Vote, a voter-advocacy nonprofit that works with adult content creators, bought banner space on Pornhub for Sunday through Tuesday (Nov 1–3), the final days before the US midterms. The banners feature four performers, including Hot2Vote co-founder Siouxsie Q and Casey Calvert, with lines like "MAKE A DATE WITH DEMOCRACY!" They link to a tool for finding polling places, early-voting sites and drop boxes, and per the Post they run on every US mobile device that uses Pornhub. Hot2Vote says it is the first time Pornhub has carried public-interest advertising. The group wouldn't disclose the cost, and Pornhub didn't respond to the Post. Digital strategist Scott Goodstein, who led online organizing for the Obama and Sanders campaigns, is one of the producers.

What changed: Last week's story was about Pornhub paying creators for SFW uploads to get back into age-verification states. A get-out-the-vote buy is the same strategy from the advertising side: the platform positioning its audience as a mainstream civic and media reach channel rather than only an adult one. It also comes as adult performers and platforms push back on the state AV laws that got Pornhub blocked to begin with.

New Sources