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Source: Is the Internet for Porn? An Insight Into the Online Adult Industry The conclusion? "In this paper, we presented novel insights into the online adult industry. We analyzed the economic structure of this industry, and found that apart from the expected “core business” of adult sites, more shady business models exist in parallel. Our evaluation shows that many adult web sites try to mislead and manipulate their visitors, with the intent of generating revenue. To this end, a wide range of questionable techniques are employed, and openly offered as business-to-business services. The tricks that these web sites employ range from simple obfuscation techniques such as relatively harmless blind links, over convenience services for typo-squatters, to sophisticated redirector chains that are used for traffic trading. Additionally, the used techniques have the potential to be exploited in more harmful ways, for example by facilitating CSRF attacks or click-fraud.

By becoming adult web site operators ourselves, we gained additional insights on unique security aspects in this domain. For example, we discovered that a malicious operator could infect more than 20,000 with a minimal investment of about $160. We conclude that many participants of this industry have business models that are based on very questionable practices that could very well be abused for malicious activities and conducting cyber-crime. In fact, we found evidence that this kind of abuse is already happening in the wild."