Research shows a surge in the popularity of deepfake porn services, with the 10 most popular “nudifying” websites receiving 18M views in January 2025 alone
Margi Murphy / Bloomberg :
Context & Ripple Effects
This finding extends a documented expansion in nonconsensual synthetic pornography: a 2023 study counted roughly 150,000 such deepfakes across 30 sites in May and described a sharp rise since 2019. The new traffic measure shifts attention from the volume of content to the scale of audience demand.
Related coverage also showed that the market’s reach was aided by easy discovery through major search results and payment access, while a later study documented the earlier growth in nonconsensual deepfake content across dedicated sites.
First-order effects
- The reported traffic gives nudifying-site operators evidence of substantial consumer demand, while people whose images can be manipulated face a larger potential audience for abusive material.
- The finding makes the scale of the problem more visible to the platforms and intermediaries that can affect discovery, creation, and transactions.
Second-order effects
- Search, payment, hosting, and social platforms face greater pressure to identify whether their services are helping users reach or fund these sites, especially given prior evidence of search visibility and card-payment acceptance.
- Demand concentrated among a small group of popular sites can make enforcement more consequential: action against major access points could reshape where users discover these services rather than eliminate underlying demand.
Third-order effects
- If audience growth continues, explicit deepfakes are likely to be treated less as isolated harmful content and more as an ecosystem problem spanning generation tools, distribution channels, and financial infrastructure.
- The pattern points to a broader moderation challenge: reducing synthetic abuse may require controls across several intermediaries, not only takedowns after content is published.
The trend: This is one data point in the industrialization of synthetic sexual-abuse services, where easy-to-use generation tools are paired with mainstream online discovery and distribution channels.