Tube site

A free porn site built like YouTube: a huge library of short clips sorted by tags and categories, paid for by ads instead of subscriptions.

A tube site is a free porn site built like YouTube: a huge library of short videos, thumbnails in a grid, a search box, categories, and ads everywhere. You do not subscribe or buy anything; you click and watch. The name comes from YouTube itself and from the "Tube" that many of these sites put in their names. For most gay men today, a tube site is where porn lives.

The word is used with mixed feelings. Tube sites gave everyone free, endless porn, and they also gutted the old business of paid studios and DVDs. When performers complain about "the tubes", they mean the sites that put their work online for free.

How tube sites work

Tube sites make money from advertising, traffic and premium upgrades, not from the videos themselves. The content comes from three places: studios that upload trailers and short clips as free advertising for their paid sites, creators and amateurs who upload their own material for exposure, and, for years, users uploading whatever they had, including pirated studio scenes.

That last part caught up with them. In December 2020 Pornhub suspended every video that had not been uploaded by a verified content partner or a member of its model program, after reports of illegal and non-consensual material on the site and after card companies cut it off; millions of videos vanished in a weekend. Since then the big tubes rely much more on verified uploaders.

How we use them

Tube sites are organized by tags and categories, and that has shaped our vocabulary. Words like twink porn, daddy porn, bear porn, interracial or fetish porn are partly search terms, the way a tube groups its library. Clips are usually short, often cut down to the best minutes, and many viewers have never watched a full studio scene from start to finish.

Tube site versus paysite

A paysite belongs to a studio or a creator and charges a subscription for full scenes in high quality. A tube is a free aggregator. The two live together: studios feed trailers to the tubes to lure people to the paysite, and a creator on OnlyFans may post teasers on a tube for the same reason.

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