When you scan one adult site with Blacklight, you get a privacy report. When you scan 167 of them, you start seeing patterns that weren't supposed to be visible.
I've been running Blacklight — The Markup's open-source privacy auditing tool — against adult sites for about a month. The original goal was straightforward: document trackers, cookies, fingerprinting, and session recording across the industry. Build a dataset. Publish the findings.
But somewhere around scan 120, I stopped looking at individual results and started looking at clusters. And that's when the corporate networks appeared.
The Setup
Blacklight checks for seven things: third-party trackers, third-party cookies, canvas fingerprinting, session recording, keystroke capture, Facebook Pixel, and Google Analytics remarketing. Each scan produces a consistent fingerprint — a combination of flags that's unique enough to compare across sites.
When two sites run by the same company use the same ad network, the same tracker stack, and the same surveillance tools, their scans look almost identical. Even when the sites themselves look completely different.
That's the tell.
Network 1: AVS Group — Session Recording Across the Board
TXXX is a free tube site. Nothing remarkable about it at first glance — standard layout, standard content, moderate traffic. The scan came back 7 trackers, 9 cookies, and session recording active.
Then I scanned hclips. Different domain, different design, different branding. The scan: 8 trackers, 26 cookies, session recording active. Same ad network — ClickAdilla. Same corporate fingerprint.
So I kept going. upornia, voyeurhit, vjav, hdzog, pornzog, hotmovs, tubepornclassic. Every single one: session recording active. Every single one: ClickAdilla ads. The tracker and cookie counts vary, but the surveillance layer is consistent.
They're all AVS Group. A network that, from the front end, looks like nine independent tube sites. From the scan data, it's one operation running session recording everywhere.
In 2025, UK regulator Ofcom fined them £1.4 million. TXXX was the flagship in that case, but the infrastructure is shared. Interestingly, TXXX actually has the lightest tracking in the network — 7 trackers and 9 cookies versus hclips at 8 trackers and 26 cookies. The site that got named in the fine is the cleanest node.
The pattern here: identical surveillance tools deployed across brands that present themselves as unrelated.
Network 2: PB Web Media — The Clean Ghost
This one is the opposite pattern. TubeGalore: 1 tracker, 0 cookies, zero ads on the actual site. iXXX: 1 tracker, 0 cookies, some banner ads. Both registered in the Netherlands through PB Web Media B.V.
PornPics, a photo gallery site with a 30-year-old domain, scans at 0 trackers, 1 cookie. Different visual identity, but the same operational fingerprint: minimal tracking, Netherlands registration, zero controversies across domains that are 18 to 27 years old.
Three sites. Same parent. Combined traffic well over 200 million visits per month. And a tracking footprint so small you'd almost miss the connection.
This is what a quietly well-run network looks like in scan data: consistent minimalism across all nodes. No session recording, no fingerprinting, no keystroke capture. Just one tracker and a clean record spanning decades.
The pattern: uniformly clean scans across brands with no public connection.
Network 3: IG Media — The Cyprus Shell
YouJizz scans at 1 tracker, 6 cookies. Beeg scans at 2 trackers, 8 cookies, plus session recording. Different sites, different user experience — Beeg is minimal and design-forward, YouJizz is a standard tube.
Both are registered through EuroDNS. Both trace back to Cyprus through shell entities. Investigative reporting by The Next Web confirmed a shared administrator, though the corporate structure is deliberately opaque.
What's interesting from a technical perspective: same holding company, same registrar, but different surveillance levels. Beeg has session recording. YouJizz doesn't. That means someone made a deliberate decision to deploy session recording on one brand and not the other within the same network.
The pattern: same corporate infrastructure, intentionally different tracking configurations per brand.
Network 4: Aylo — The Free vs. Premium Split
This is the most documented network, but the scan data reveals something I haven't seen reported elsewhere.
Aylo owns Pornhub, RedTube, YouPorn, Tube8 (free tubes) and Brazzers, RealityKings, Twistys, Babes (premium studios). That's public knowledge.
The scan pattern: every free tube has exactly 2 trackers. Every premium studio has exactly 0.
Not approximately. Not "fewer." Zero versus two, consistently, across every property I scanned.
The business model determines the tracking stack, not the brand, not the tech team, not the domain age. Free sites that monetize through ads deploy trackers. Premium sites that monetize through subscriptions don't need to.
This is the cleanest example of how corporate policy, not technical capability, drives surveillance decisions. Same parent company, same engineering team presumably, completely different tracking based on revenue model.
How to Spot These Patterns Yourself
If you want to replicate this:
Scan with Blacklight at themarkup.org/blacklight. It's free, takes about 45 seconds per site.
Record the full output, not just the summary. The specific tracker domains, cookie names, and flag combinations matter more than the counts.
Look for shared ad networks. ClickAdilla across multiple sites = likely same operator. Same tracker domain appearing on "unrelated" sites = shared infrastructure.
Check registrars. Sites that share a registrar (especially niche ones like EuroDNS or Gransy s.r.o.) and have similar scan profiles are probably related.
Compare session recording deployment. This is the most telling flag. Session recording costs money to implement and process. When it appears on multiple "independent" sites, someone is paying for it centrally.
Cross-reference with WHOIS history. Privacy-protected WHOIS on its own means nothing. Privacy-protected WHOIS plus identical scan fingerprints plus shared registrar is a pattern.
What This Reveals
The adult web isn't thousands of independent sites. It's a handful of networks operating dozens of brands each, with corporate structures designed to obscure the relationships.
From a user perspective, you think you're choosing between independent options. From the scan data, you're often choosing between different front ends for the same surveillance infrastructure.
That doesn't mean every network is malicious. PB Web Media runs a clean operation across all its properties. Aylo's premium studios are tracker-free. The point isn't that networks are inherently bad — it's that you can't evaluate a site's privacy practices without understanding which network it belongs to.
And the only way to figure that out, in most cases, is to scan them all and look for the fingerprints they didn't mean to leave.
The full dataset — 167 sites scanned, 1,007 sites in the privacy database — is available at nsfwranker.com. Every scan uses Blacklight by The Markup. The tool is free and open to anyone.
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