The UK has responded by blocking porn unless people "opt in", while in New Zealand, the Government has been considering a range of options following the recent internet safety campaign, "Keeping it real online".
Yet little research has been done on porn sites that compares them directly to major streaming sites like Netflix and YouTube.
"Pornography online has been with us since the fledgling days of the internet but research into online pornography has been and continues to be very limited," University of Auckland computer scientist Dr Aniket Mahanti said.
In their study, Mahanti and data analyst Cameron Wong analysed a number of metrics on popular pornography website xHamster and then compared those to mainstream video streaming services such as YouTube.
They collected global data on the number of videos, the number of views of each video, duration of videos, tags and use of a site's social features such as the "like" feature.
They found xHamster was nowhere near as large as YouTube – the latter was hosting five billion videos when the data was gathered in 2018, with an estimated 500 hours of video uploaded per minute.
Meanwhile, xHamster typically had 2000 videos uploaded in one 24-hour period and had just under four million videos.
But a comparison on the number of views of each video shows a significant difference between the two sites: on average, a YouTube video received 5,500 views whereas on xHamster, individual videos were viewed 63,000 times on average.
Looking at the median length of time videos are watched, the difference was stark: the median number of views of an xHamster video was 17,000, while the number of median views of a YouTube video was 89.
"Put simply this means xHamster videos are likely to get almost 200 times the number of views a YouTube video will get," Mahanti said.
"And that's not just about the number of videos available, it means that users are continuing to watch whatever is posted to xHamster which in turn is evidence that there is very strong demand for this content."
xHamster videos were also generally shorter than those on YouTube, with the average video length of 8.8 minutes compared to 11.7 minutes on YouTube.
Shorter duration videos appeared to be more likely to have been uploaded by amateur uploaders rather than paid video studios which is a continuation of a long-term trend where anyone could produce and upload content.
Another comparative difference between mainstream video streaming services and pornography websites was that social networking features on xHamster and other porn sites were relatively underutilised.
The average number of comments on an xHamster video was seven, while on YouTube the number was 475, as at 2010.
But xHamster videos received more comments and ratings than comparable sites, with an average of 99 "likes" per video and an average of seven comments compared to an average of five comments on PornHub and an average of two on YouPorn.
The "like" feature was by far the most popular social feature on pornography sites in general.
Another difference between the sites was the relative popularity of new content – xHamster videos tended to gain almost all their views in the first three days, behaviour that was more like that of people accessing weather reports or online news, Wong said.
"While the research didn't focus on pornography addiction, that behaviour appears to show that porn viewers are constantly looking for fresh content which in turn might mean a small number of individuals are consistently looking for something they haven't seen before because they have already viewed a lot of a site's content."
The new findings confirmed the popularity of porn – xHamster has been growing exponentially since 2012 when smart devices and internet access became much more widely used than previously.
Data showed the number of videos being uploaded to xHamster tripled from 2013 to 2017.
"The internet is a defining force in today's society so we need to understand all of it, not just part of it," Mahanti said.
"We need to understand how these services are operating so that government policy and education policies are better informed to educate people about the dangers."
