XHamster

Isn’t xHamster just a site for cute rodents?

If you’re like me, you may have been duped when you were younger to go and visit xHamster because you were told it was just a place for pictures of people’s fluffy pets. The reality is that xHamster is a tube website devoted to nothing but hardcore sex videos from hundreds of studios and independent amateur uploads. My research seems to suggest that in traffic, xHamster is one of the most popular porn-based websites out there – according to Alexa, it’s currently ranked 59 in the world for overall visitors – PornHub is 27. Suffice to say that you ought to expect big things out of this popular adult streaming platform: lots of visitors and a history dating back over a decade is a recipe for pornographic perfection. Now then, let’s talk about the good and the bad when it comes to xHamster.

The Initial xHamster experience

For me, tube sites are basically winners or losers based upon their initial user experience. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve visited a video network that had terrible design and made me want to leave the minute I landed on the homepage. On the whole, xHamster does a stellar job of delivering a great initial browse. First, it displays 10 ‘hot porn videos’ that you can instantly switch out with other recommendations using the ‘refresh’ feature – these switch out without the entire page reloading and literally takes milliseconds to finish up. Below that, you’ve got the newest scenes added and according to xHamster, roughly 3,000 new videos are added on a daily basis.

This segment is also used to sort content based on user rating and length – it makes refining what you’re looking for a walk in the park. Elsewhere, you’ve got the option to view all of the videos on the site, or just see those that are tagged as HD or supportive of VR. Few porn tubes have support for these features right now, so it’s good to see xHamster go above and beyond to deliver for the end-user. Finally, along the left-hand side of the homepage, a list of the most popular niches is offered for you to click through. You’ll see the classics such Asian, amateur, blowjob, massage, lesbian and teen with a further option to check out all of the available categories. Based on my time looking around xHamster, I’m happy with how accurately videos are tagged – some sites have users trying to game the system by spamming uploads with every possible category, but that doesn’t appear to be the case here.

Watching porn in style

When you finally get around to selecting a video that you like, the same quality experience you get from browsing is continued through to the stream. The videos are very similarly displayed as on YouTube, with a cog located in the same location to change the quality of the footage, if you want to play it in slow motion and a ‘large mode’ that makes the video bigger without being in full screen. One thing that appears to be missing on xHamster that I’ve seen elsewhere is mini-thumbnail displays when you hover over the time bar so you can get an idea of where the scene is at. If I had to recommend an improvement to the guys here, that would likely be it – I think it’s a great feature that really gives the user more control over the content they watch.

Support for offline content viewing is a great selling point for tube sites and xHamster allows you to store videos locally using the download option. You can sign up to the tube in order to get this function instantly, or wait 60 seconds as a guest for the same functionality. Believe it or not, I actually just got a new Internet connection here at my office so I could test sites a little better. When downloading a 200 MB video from xHamster in 720p quality, it took me around 12 seconds from start to finish. The connection actually peaked at around 19 MB/s, which is complete saturation of my 150 Mb/s link. This is great for the end user, as it effectively allows you to store material on demand – the only limit is your Internet connection.

Is premium membership to xHamster worth it?

Lots of adult video tubes have premium membership deals now and xHamster is no exception. Gold membership is quite pricey at $19.99 USD per month – if you’re based in the UK, it’s £17.45. You can pay via Credit Card or PayPal: I guess that’s quite cool. For this pretty high price tag, you get access to over 8,700 videos from a range of studios, most of which seem to be supported in 1080p HD formats. From what I can gather, they basically have licensing rights to content from professional studios and paysites. There are 500+ contributors, including Teen Mega World, Japan Lust, Tricky Agent, Stepmom Seduction and Eros Arts. If I’m honest with you, it’s not an all-star collection of paysite material: most of the biggest producers aren’t licensing their content here.

You can also purchase tokens to be used to watch scenes. These are sold in batches of 200, 520, 1085 and 2250. 200 tokens sets you back $19.99 and videos are usually 25 or 50 tokens a pop. Not competitive value for money, but if you’re trying to watch something you can’t find anywhere else, it’s a good service.

It’s worth noting that xHamster’s current free content archive consists of around 1.3 million videos.

My beef with xHamster

Look, I don’t like to complain much, and what I’m about to talk about you guys might not give two fucks for, but a few years ago xHamster made a change that really pissed me off. Basically, after the whole Brock Turner thing, they stated that they were no longer going to support porn that they considered to be supportive of ‘rape culture’. This seemed like a PR stunt and a terrible one at that, but the way that they did it was less than reasonable.

If you go onto xHamster and type in keywords like rape, you’ll get a message that says “probably it’s time you consulted with a professional psychologist”. The problem here is that there are millions of consumers of simulated rape pornography who are mentally healthy and don’t need help, because an interest in this sub-culture of BDSM isn’t a problem. I felt personally attacked, because I’m a dom at heart – I also know plenty of women that took offense to this idea that if you’re into that type of content, you’re somehow a bad person and need help.

I’m not going to defend non-simulated content because I’m morally opposed to that – but if everyone involved is happy with what’s going on, why the virtue signaling? The worst part is that xHamster seems a little inconsistent on their content policies, because I think if you’re going to ban simulated rape pornography, you’ve got to kick voyeur as well, but there are thousands of scenes in this category – they’ve even written a description for it.

Conclusion

I still think xHamster is a great site regardless of my political issues with its content censorship. Overall, this place delivers a great experience to the end user and doesn’t promise anything it can’t deliver. If you’re into BDSM material you might want to find a tube more accepting of your interests, but for a general consumer of smut, this place is the gold standard when it comes to live streaming platforms.