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

Published : July 18th, 2022 Written by vienna

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.

Comments


yabbo 2 years ago
well I guess that’s that. they’re closing up shop. the writing was on the wall (imo) but it’s still a bummer. I got a ton of vr titles from them and just enjoyed their ui, but everything comes to an end I guess
ZENRA 2 years ago

Outside of DMM studios, SLR now probably has all the JAV VR R18 had and then some with a MUCH better UI.

Lezlover69 2 years ago
I submitted a request to consider deactivating DRM from all purchased movies to allow viewing beyond Jan 2023. Will let you know what they reply with and I realize it's a long shot. Meanwhile, has anyone determined if there is a way around the DRM?
ZENRA 2 years ago

We can allow people to air their grievances about DRM, but studio have asked us not to let it go beyond that so any posts about how to specifically remove it will not be allowed.

Lezlover69 2 years ago
The thing that makes no sense is almost all other Western porn websites are still up and functioning normally with CC purchasing alive and well. Additionally, the Japanese version (DMM) is still functioning as before. So, a general crack-down on porn doesn't seem to be the reason.
ZENRA 2 years ago

I think I wrote this elsewhere, but this whole issue screams insanely incompetent and conservative upper management not letting those who manage R18 the ability to get processing outside of very select parameters.

Al2000 2 years ago
I guess they are a competitor to you, but I liked them because of the ease of use. In English obviously, and easy to navigate. Also they a lot of stuff. I mostly bought and didn't rent. And the direct links from javlibrary meant I could use JAVlibrary to sort of what I wanted or didn't want and use their link to R18 to buy or see what the price was.
The regular sales were great. I have a big back catalog with them.

Anyways, I could find those titles on javlibrary, and get links to buy them at R18. It was easy.

It is sad it is going to an all-rental format. I'd rather just buy something on sale and have it for good.
I hope it doesnt all get migrated to an all-Japanese language website.

Can't they move to some sort of gimmick where you are buying "points" in bulk and then using those points to buy titles? Would that make the Credit Card companies happier?
ZENRA 2 years ago

I stand by what I said before that while card compliance remains an issue with R18's current state, the reason they still are only operating on virtual life support has less to do with finding *a* biller (or three) and more to do with slow, conservative management restricting what they're able to do.

RFW 2 years ago
Where is the best place to buy movies now then?
ZENRA 2 years ago

I can provide a biased answer.

jackfromdownunder 2 years ago
You'd have to wonder if there is a clandestine effort by financial organisations to clamp down on porn overall. There appears to be no link between whats happening at pornhub and more legitimate retailers like R18. If the trend appears to be across the board in regards to payment options, then add in the recent legislative changes to JAV then this could lead to a lot of unemployed actresses - literally no money, no honey.
ZENRA 2 years ago

I think if anything financial organizations will want to process anything legal. There may be efforts in various parts of the world to make it harder to buy adult content, but it's certainly not by these organizations.

We will see more non-mainstream JAV released in the near future to compensate for any lessening of mainstream's output.

drk 2 years ago
I'll repost my comment from elsewhere:

I had a minor epiphany.

It makes sense to freeze your credentials library (so list of users and what they permanently have) if you want to do something with that database, say migrate it somewhere else or append it to another library.

This way you can do the migration at a leisurely pace because the copy you took on the first of June (when you stopped both registrations and adding new content) would be the master copy (no new users, no permanent holdings - only some rentals)....

I mean I know that you could do it faster and live, but we're dealing with a big, old corp here.
drk 2 years ago
I find the lack of comms by DMM to be the worst thing. No timelines, no official reason, just 'technical reasons' BS excuse that would be acceptable if they had an outage for a few hours.

And unless DMM (the corp) decides to move R18's library back to motherbase (DMM.co.jp), using both libraries is a pain as both have the same file format (.dcv), so you'd need to remember which file comes from where and manually select the correct player. (not to mention the pain of having to manually remember which movies you already own on the other platform).

I wonder why they decided to stop adding new works, the power users would still be able to get their DMM points (via VPN + DMM or japanese amazon) and the costs of translating movie titles is essentially 0, so it sounds like they voluntarily gave up on that income stream.
ZENRA 2 years ago

I have a very good theory why there has been little communication. Stay tuned for part two. ;)

drk 2 years ago
I'm looking forward to reading it, as personally I can't think of reasons that are not coming from the 'incompetence' area.
ZENRA 2 years ago

Oh "incompetence" is definitely part of it. Just how we have been adding some alternative (non-CC) payment options, R18 could easily do as well. A paysite solely taking credit cards and only through one biller is playing with fire.

Forgotten username?

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