Before censorship, porn traffic averaged 8.4–11.5% of HTTP bandwidth across residential and SOHO users respectively. Post-censorship, this fraction fell to ≈3.5–4.0% for residential and ≈2.0–3.7% for SOHO users. Even after accounting for traffic shifted to unblocked alternate porn domains and the contemporaneous SSL/VPN increase, porn traffic did not return to pre-block levels, suggesting censorship achieved partial demand suppression despite being bypassable via alternate DNS resolvers.
From 2014-khattak-look — A Look at the Consequences of Internet Censorship Through an ISP Lens
· §6.1, Table 7, Table 11
· 2014
· Internet Measurement Conference
Implications
Even bypassable DNS-only blocking measurably reduced demand, indicating that circumvention tools must be easy enough to use that adoption friction does not itself suppress usage of blocked content.
The absence of an SSL surge for porn (unlike YouTube) suggests topic sensitivity raises the social cost of circumventing some blocks — tools should minimize metadata exposure and usage visibility to lower adoption barriers for sensitive content.