Ever-evolving age verification (AV) regulations make it critical for companies in the adult sector to ensure legal compliance while protecting the privacy of adults wishing to view adult content. In the past, however, adult sites implementing AV solutions have seen up to a 60% drop in traffic as a result. This dramatic impact has placed business owners in a difficult situation. Implementing age verification on your site shouldn’t cost you business.
Low-friction options are therefore vital to enhance the overall user experience while ensuring compliance and protecting revenue. Wherever regulations mandate age verification, the industry needs access to a comprehensive, fully inclusive range of compliant methods to ensure the highest pass rates possible with minimal disruption.
Different platforms have varying levels of risk associated with them, depending on the nature of the services they offer.
Several core principles contribute to successful age verification. A few of these are proportionality, optionality, compliance, and end-user privacy and experience. Over the next few months, we will delve into these core principles and examine how each contributes to successful age verification. Let’s start with proportionality.
Understanding Proportionality
Different platforms have varying levels of risk associated with them, depending on the nature of the services they offer and the potential consequences of underage access. Proportionality in age verification relates to implementing methods appropriate for the level of risk a platform presents, explained succinctly by the phrase, “You don’t need a sledgehammer to crack a nut.”
Adult sites need to implement sufficient age verification methods to ensure compliance with state regulations, but these methods shouldn’t be to the detriment of business pass rates and revenue. For example, while stringent KYC checks would be suitable for a financial institution, this level of verification is not needed in the case of an adult site. Adult sites do, however, need a high level of certainty that a person trying to access their site is not a minor.
Adult sites should therefore implement age verification proportionate to their risk. Available age verification methods have been designed to reflect these differing levels of risk while maintaining compliance, but what does proportionate age verification for the adult sector look like?
How to Choose the Right Verification Methods
While higher-risk platforms may choose to use more intrusive KYC checks for higher assurance and to mitigate greater associated risks, age estimation techniques that use AI-based facial analysis or email address offer a highly accurate yet lower-friction alternative for adult sites.
The key is to balance legal compliance with user experience and privacy, ensuring businesses comply with state laws while protecting their pass rates and, in turn, revenue. Using facial age estimation, ID scans or credit card checks in isolation can cause friction — and likely a huge drop in traffic. Therefore, I recommend low-friction options such as age estimation using email addresses, and only using facial age estimation or ID scan as a backup option.
Balancing Compliance With User Experience
It’s crucial to balance age verification measures with a seamless user experience. Overly strict verification processes can deter users, affecting pass rates and revenue. For example, suppose a user trying to access an adult site is presented with ID scan as an option in isolation. Requiring them to find an ID document and upload a clear photo — assuming they even have those things — is likely to make users hesitate due to privacy concerns.
There are, however, highly accurate alternatives that offer adult sites a strong balance between compliance and user experience. It is important that sites implement easily integrated tech with clear instructions to guide users through the verification process smoothly.
Methods such as age estimation using email address are widely accessible, and users are already used to providing their email address as a personal identifier when accessing accounts or purchasing age-restricted items. Built to preserve privacy and incorporate data minimization and privacy-by-design principles, this method has minimal friction. It can be used by anyone with an active email address, irrespective of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality or any other trait and is the quickest and easiest way to determine a user’s age online, typically returning a result in as little as two to three seconds.
Integrating techniques such as this one can significantly enhance the user experience by providing quick and nonintrusive verification while maintaining a high level of certainty that users are of legal age. Also consider offering multiple verification methods to cater to different user preferences.
The Time to Act Is Now and the Tech Is Here
As previously noted, the key is to strike a balance between the level of data required for age verification and the user’s expectations and tolerance for friction. By aligning this process with the platform’s risk level and user expectations, businesses can create a more satisfying and efficient user experience that is low in friction while ensuring compliance with age-related regulations.
Safety technology providers are here to help support adult businesses in the effective implementation of frictionless, trustworthy solutions to maintain their integrity, protect their reputation, safeguard their users, avoid hefty fines and maintain compliance. By working together, we can create a balanced approach that ensures compliance while protecting your revenue, and ultimately creates a safer, more inclusive and user-friendly online environment for all.
Gavin Worrall is VP of Global Strategic Partnerships at VerifyMy, a safety technology provider with a vision to provide solutions that safeguard children and society online. Spanning age assurance, identity verification, content moderation and consent management, VerifyMy seeks to offer frictionless, trustworthy solutions for online platforms to maintain their integrity, protect their reputation and safeguard their users. He can be reached at sales@verifymy.io.
