With tougher age verification for online porn access introduced in many countries and regions recently, and the number of complaints from porn creators about social media censorship rising, it’s perhaps unsurprising that many adult content creators are concerned about their income.
This is reflected in a new survey of primarily US-based adult content creators, which found that more creators are reporting downturns in their earnings and are citing the effects of age verification as reasons.
Those earnings span the full range of adult creator income, including clip sales, live camming, subscriptions on platforms like OnlyFans, and pay-per-view or messaging services. Researchers found that clip sales were becoming more important to porn creators.
The survey, by US-based market research company SWR Data, found that in 2025, 45.2 percent of respondents reported a decrease in their adult content income over the previous year. In their 2024 survey 38 percent of respondents said their adult content income had decreased in the past year.
For the 2025 survey only 29 percent of respondents said their adult content income was rising, which is a large drop from the 40 percent figure seen in 2024.
The big squeeze
Is the great individual porn creator boom we saw around the Covid pandemic slowing down, if not quite fizzling out entirely?
The concerns adult content creators have raised around censorship and regulatory overreach are no longer abstract, they’re showing up in bank balances. In the survey, 63 percent of respondents said it had gotten harder to earn money in the past year.
78 percent of the creators responding said that anti-porn campaigns had hurt their revenue. 74 percent said they’d experienced increased censorship on social media. 54 percent said they had trouble with fans being able to access their content, and 61 percent said they’d faced increased restrictions on what they could sell.
New age verification rules also loom large over the data. Currently Aylo’s porn sites, including Pornhub, are blocked in around half of the US states, following tougher age verification rules being brought in. OnlyFans enforces strict age verification for users and recently introduced compulsory criminal records checks for new US-based creators via Checkr, a background check provider with its own documented history of questionable reports, adding another layer of risk for independent creators.
SWR researchers said: “Creators in the survey repeatedly cited fan discomfort in handing over IDs, sharp declines in traffic following AV [age verification] laws and, for creators living in states with age-verification laws, difficulty in accessing platforms themselves. The drop in sales shows [the] impact AV laws are having on legal adults’ willingness to access sites with age-verification.”
Aylo recently blocked Pornhub users who don’t already have a registered account on the site from accessing it, in another indicator of porn access toughening in the country.
SWR researchers said: “Perhaps not surprisingly, creators dependent on the US and UK markets were more likely to report difficulties for fans accessing adult content. They were also more likely to report increased piracy, as fans who can no longer access content on a paysite due to age-verification are incentivized to find it on pirate sites.”
The wrong target?
Many people have little sympathy for adult content creators facing work downturns due to toughening rules, saying that the industry has been a Wild West for too long and that effective age restrictions were overdue.
But recent data backs up SWR researchers’ assertions that reams of legitimate adult porn consumers are wary about submitting personal details such as ID and face scans for age verification, and are being pushed to less well-regulated sites and platforms for porn.
There are social components to this crackdown, too. Many adult content creators who work independently come from low-income backgrounds, with the industry now offering a method of employment previously out of reach when controlled by studios and executive figures. Critics of tougher porn restrictions say that the industry types suffering most from them are these creators from lower-income backgrounds.
SWR’s data suggested that it was indeed the smaller creators that were being hit hardest by crackdowns. In the survey, 50 percent of creators earning $5,000 or less per month from adult content said their income from this work had decreased, compared to 29.6 percent of creators earning $10,000 or more per month.
An important snapshot
The survey should be taken as a snapshot rather than the last word on the state of the adult content industry. It was based on responses in late 2025 from only around 550 respondents, collected in late 2025, mostly US-based, is a thin base for sweeping conclusions about the global adult creator economy.
The income downturn trend is clear, though. Sex work may be work, as the supportive phrase goes, but it’s work that is increasingly under threat.
“While more study is needed,” SWR researchers said, “attacks on the adult industry, often done in the name of stopping exploitation, appear to be having the opposite effect: pushing economically vulnerable populations toward greater economic peril.”
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