Here’s Why Porn Is Appearing on News Websites Across the Web

The internet is a wonderful place for finding out information, connecting with friends, and being entertained. But it can surprise you when, for example, visiting The Washington Post or Huffington Post results in hardcore porn flashing up on your screen.

As Vice reports, that’s exactly what’s happening at the moment due to a popular video hosting site shutting down and a porn company acquiring its domain name. That, combined with nobody bothering to check if old video embeds still work correctly, is causing quite a bit of embarrassment for both the websites involved and the people visiting them.

The video hosting site in question is Vidme, which shut down in 2017. Since then, whoever was in charge of renewing the domain name failed to do so and it became available to purchase by someone else. A porn site called 5 Star Porn HD (which you definitely shouldn’t visit while at work) acquired the domain and now both the Vid.me domain and any Vidme embeds that remain on other websites redirect to the porn company’s homepage.

The websites hit by this porn problem are understandably reacting quickly and removing or replacing the embeds as they find them. It’s unfortunate because not only does the video redirect to a porn website, it can display a pornographic image where the video should be. This has happened on the Huffington Post, New York Magazine, Uproxx, The Washington Post, and PCMag, to name but a few.

Vidme launched in 2014 when YouTube was the only major platform and the founders saw an opportunity to help creators targeting niche audiences. It proved popular, hosting millions of videos and generating over 6 billion views. Now we have to wonder how many times those videos were embedded on websites, and how many still remain active.