What's Going On With R18? How Did We Get Here?

During the first days of April, a multitude of movies were removed from the R18 library.  It was a considerable (but not a major) portion of the titles on the platform. Users who had previously purchased the aforementioned movies still had access to them and could (and still can) enjoy the content for which they paid; users who had not purchased them, however, no longer had the ability to purchase the products, nor rent them, in any way. This measure also led, among other things, to the total removal of the title pool of certain studios.

R18 doesn't accept new users and disabled most purchase options, except 7 days rental. This message shows up when you try to purchase a title or sign up.

This event is broadly reminiscent of the previous purge of pornographic content that took place largely in the West, especially on popular platforms such as Pornhub: in fact, in late 2020, the Canadian pornography giant removed a huge amount of footage from its servers, mostly decimating amateur productions but leaving films and videos from large, well-known producers and studios completely unscathed. In fact, Pornhub at that time removed the ability to upload pornographic content from all users considered 'unverified,' which represented a non-marginal slice of the content offered (both paid for and free) on the platform. The effects of the termination of content uploaded by unverified users definitely changed the face of pornography on the site, which is quite different in terms of its proposed content. The reason why Pornhub did what it had to do was because of the stringent measures imposed by Visa and Mastercard, which threatened to discontinue the ability to pay by using their banking circuits on the platform--a threat that was very much felt and, considering that the vast majority of the population of the West uses cards from those circuits, an instantaneous interruption of the service would have caused a disastrous financial collapse that, frankly, no company of that size could afford. On the other hand, those on the other end of the banking circuit say they made such demands to preserve the integrity of posted content. In short, it was feared that many videos on Pornhub involved non-consensual users (still, the amount of non-consensual or CSAM would make up only a fraction of the content uploaded to Pornhub, whilst SNS such as Twitter and Facebook actually have a much higher CSAM to non-CSAM content ratio). As much as the case affected Pornhub, other platforms such as Redtube, YouPorn, and XTube were not left unscathed.

The website is very clear in making you understand that no, you can't purchases titles anymore, but you can rent them temporarily.

One has to wonder about the similarities of the events involving Pornhub and Visa/Mastercard with what has been happening, recently, on R18. In addition to the pre-emptive removal of a large number of movies, R18 has discontinued the ability to purchase movies on the platform. It is literally as it reads: you can no longer buy movies on R18. It is, however, possible to rent them for a period of seven days, and this applies to all films that were not part of the purge on the platform. It is also no longer possible to register a new account, but you can access your previously created account. A possible reason why will be discussed in a second article on this blog.

In summary, users who are already registered and have made purchases can take advantage of the content they own, but users who are not registered (or without any purchased titles) cannot take advantage of any movies except in the form of a temporary rental. This is something huge, gigantic that not even the closest industry observers expected. And the reason is very simple: it is difficult to find similarities between the case of R18 and the case of sites like Pornhub, because the latter involves direct uploading of movies and videos by users (to which previously, in the case of Pornhub, no verification status was required), while on R18 every content that arrives on the library is manually approved and counter-verified by the administration, and on the other hand the source of the content is always a production studio, and not just any John Doe. In short, these are radically different platforms and problems for which it is difficult to find a connection.

If you try to register a new account, R18 simply doesn't let you fill in the form, which is currently disabled. This is huge problem.

However, as much as R18 is a Japanese pornography provider, its target customer is obviously outside of Japan. There is no reason why a non-Westerner should buy a JAV on R18: in that case, there are other ad hoc distributors. It was pointed out, however, that the real first restrictive measure applied on R18, even before the removal of the ability to register a new account, was the restriction of available payment methods: in particular, it was not possible to pay by taking advantage of certain bank circuits or credit cards. One wonders, despite the obvious difference in the nature of the content between the two platforms, whether there was not some restricting request by Visa and Mastercard; a request that R18’s administration may still not be sure how to handle. More on this matter will be discussed on the second part of this article.

So, it could be another measure applied to the platform for content compliance rules issues. Let's also make clear that R18 has not given any confirmation or given specific reasons for what is happening to the site. They are just referring to generic billing issues. It is the opinion of ZENRA's admin that if this were to be the case, namely that there was a compliance problem (which is very likely, given the 'nature' of the JAVs removed by R18, perhaps considered ambiguous), then R18 would 'only need' to religiously follow the rules imposed by the banking circuits to solve, to a large extent, the not inconsiderable problems that are plaguing it.

These are the very last few titles released on R18, most of them released on the 1st of June, 2022. No titles have been released past that date.

To date, the most recent headlines posted on R18 date from June 1, and the restrictive measures described are still in place. The future of R18 is uncertain, but one thing is clear: the platform needs to get moving on fixing its problems, before it is too late.