How we rate sites

We spend a long time in the members' areas of the sites we review, enabling us to form a complete picture of what is on offer to subscribers. The result of that effort is, we hope, the most authoritative reviews of those sites around. The format we use to present our reviews is intended to be accessible and self-explanatory, with a large amount of statistical information provided in addition to the written review.

The following is a complete breakdown of the different sections of our review pages:


Categories

A site may be placed in up to three categories, which are ranked in descending order (the first one mentioned is the closest match). There is a threshold below which a site will not be placed in a category. A site offering 10,000 videos, only a few of which are lesbian scenes, will not be included in the lesbian category, for example. There is no hard-and-fast rule about the amount of content required to justify inclusion in a category. We simply try to ensure our category listings include all sites with significant amounts of material in the respective niches.


Review last updated

This is the date we last visited the site. The written review and all statistical information on the page are accurate to that date. We try to visit sites at least once a year, so our review should be an excellent indication of the very least you can expect from your membership.


Price

Pricing structures can be complex, but essentially what most people are interested in is either a trial membership (usually a week or less), a monthly membership or a long-term membership. Of course it is a simple matter to visit the site to check whether any other deals are available. While we encourage sites to provide short-term memberships, customers should beware that many sites do not provide full access to a site's content with such offers (either by limiting access to particular sections of the site or by imposing a restrictive download limit). We will point out the limitations of trial memberships where we can, but as a rule we cannot guarantee that trial memberships will offer the same access entitlements as longer subscriptions.


Pictures and videos

This section should be self-explanatory (it is intended to be). The following points of clarification might be helpful:

- figures are given for the total amount of videos as well as the total amount of high definition (HD) videos, and for this purpose high definition means a resolution of 1280x720 or above
- where a site has lots of video in different resolutions and/or formats, the most common are given
- ZIP files are files which contain all of the images in a certain gallery, a feature which facilitates far quicker downloading than saving every picture individually
- DRM stands for digital rights management, a rights-protection technology occasionally employed by adult sites to limit access to videos to current subscribers only (by making them insert a current working password for the video to play); this is extremely unpopular with members, since it forces them to keep forking out month after month for content they've already downloaded, and is rarely used by sites for that reason


Review

We pride ourselves on providing well-written, honest, accurate and helpful reviews. We try to strike a balance between detail and brevity: people on the lookout for porn tend to be particularly unwilling to spend lots of time reading unnecessarily long and detailed descriptions of sites. Essentially, they want to know two things: what sort of content is available, and is it good quality. Those are the issues we focus on, though we will also try to mention other matters which have a direct bearing on how enjoyable and usable a site is. Our aim is to enable a person who has read the review to have a very good idea of exactly what they're getting and whether they should subscribe.


Content charts

The purpose of these charts is to provide at-a-glance information about the type of content available to subscribers. They are by nature somewhat rough and impressionistic, but they should give a decent indication of how the content of the site is divided up.


Score

We use a scoring system that attaches greater weight to the nature of the content offered by a site. While the impressiveness of the design, navigation, extras and so on will enhance the overall user experience, would-be members are primarily interested in the quality and quantity of the pictures and videos on offer. The weighting system we use is as follows:

    Content quality        30%
    Content amount       15%
    Updates                  15%
    Entertainment          15%
    Exclusivity                 5%
    Navigation               10%
    Design                      5%
    Download                 5%

Content quality
Both technical and, if relevant, artistic quality are considered. As with all of the scoring criteria, adjustments may be made according to the type of content on offer: high quality nude beach footage is more difficult to shoot than studio-based videos, for example. It hardly needs saying that quality is improving at an exponential rate. The modern day nudity hunter will not be satisfied by grainy 800x600 pixel pictures and jerky 320x200 resolution videos! As a general guide, subscribers should now expect image sizes of at least 1200 pixels, and video resolution of 640x400 (and, in some categories, high definition content).

Content amount
Internet porn has been around long enough now that some of the older sites offer pretty bewilderingly large archives. However, due to improvements in quality, on many sites that older material does not stand comparison with more recent content. It is for that reason that the speed of updating (see below) is weighted just as heavily as the quantity of content overall. In fact, as a general rule, sites are not penalised too heavily for lacking masses of content unless the actual amount is so negligible that the lack of choice represents an obvious detriment to members. The quantity score is also weighted depending on whether the site has a video or photo focus, to ensure that sites are not downgraded too markedly for lacking a certain type of content (e.g. artistic nude sites lacking videos will not thereby be able to score only a maximum of half the available points). Note that 'bonus' content, particularly if non-exclusive, will usually have minimal impact on this score.

Updates
Sites will not (or at least should not) be able to retain members unless they can offer new material on a regular basis. While the rate of updating expected of a site varies according to its category, members should expect at the very least to see something new on a weekly basis. The size of the updates is also important: a site offering 5 new full videos once a week will score better than one which updates daily with a small chunk of one video. Sites which rotate older content will be penalised quite heavily too.

Entertainment
This is the least 'scientific' of the criteria, for obvious reason: who are we to judge what turns people on? As a result, sites tend to be scored on this criterion by reference to other sites in their niche. Important considerations will be: does the site have 'personality'? is the content varied or repetitive? does the site offer anything new or is it simply porn-by-numbers? does the site have any interesting or novel features? is there a community angle such as a forum and how popular is it?

Exclusivity
Exclusivity is probably cherished more highly by reviewers than porn surfers! We do tend to see the same faces and material again and again. However, there is a definite value in a site offering something unavailable anywhere else, and for that reason we do include exclusivity as a factor, albeit one with relatively little weight attached to it. Note that for celebrity content, where the material is by nature non-exclusive, high marks can still be obtained by sites offering more unusual or rare pictures and movies.

Navigation
While members are predominantly concerned by the content offered by a site, the user experience can be improved dramatically by a clean, helpful navigational system. The crux is enabling subscribers to know exactly what is provided and ensuring they can get to what they want easily. The following features are what we look for:

  - 'obvious' navigation: not unnecessarily complicated or cluttered
  - content divided sensibly into categories
  - useful descriptions of content where appropriate
  - decent-sized thumbnails
  - vidcaps or preview clips for videos
  - model index
  - search functionality

Design
The simple eye-catching attractiveness of the site is the foundation of this score. While people surfing for adult content are unlikely to be unduly stressed by dodgy logos, borders and icons, a pleasant-looking and thematically consistent design can improve the user experience at least to a degree.

Download
This mark represents how easy it is to actually get hold of the content. Factors considered here include download speed, the availability of ZIP files, the option to both stream and download videos, sensible file-naming conventions and the (hopefully non-) use of DRM.

Price (not a factor)
We do not use price as a determining factor in our ratings. This is because, although subscription cost will usually be an important consideration in any buying decision, the price of joining is not a factor affecting the quality of the site as such. We can therefore achieve greater overall consistency in our ratings by sticking to site-based factors alone. Needless to say, the higher the score we give a site, the better value for money you are likely to get from your membership.