Once again, as outlined below, if the true goal were to protect minors, there would be more effective, and far cheaper, ways to achieve that.
On a completely unrelated note (*cough*), we’re proud to announce our very first affiliate partnership in the history of our websites!
If you’re traveling, you might run into restrictions based on local laws in your holiday destination. With our partner NordVPN, you can easily and securely connect to your home country, and support our site at the same time.
Your support helps us cover the growing costs associated with new compliance regulations.
Oh yes, we are aware of the new laws and have been monitoring them regularly for the past 3 years. The UK is not the first. Similar regulations are already enforced in parts of Europe and in the U.S. on the state level. The UK is just the one going live now, so it’s making headlines. We will see if this ends up being the final drop in the bucket that pushes these rules globally. Right now, it kind of looks that way.
First let's get the obvious out of the way: we are not against making the internet safer for minors. It's a good cause. But we believe this is not what is being done: if helping kids was the goal, the trivial solution would be for websites to declare, in metadata, a minimum age to enter, and devices, set up by parents or guardians, to enforce it. This would "save the children" without infringing on the rights of every adult in the world, and would defeat a whole range of scams and circumventing methods that are now being used to bypass age checks. It would be a robust, clean solution. So you have to ask why this is not being done. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
The current reality is a piecemeal patchwork of regulations that vary wildly from country to country, and even within countries. Some require full ID checks, or liveness checks, credit cards, e-mails, "adult pass" apps, the list goes on. There is a whole industry of age verification providers that have sprung up to help sites comply with these rules. Even with this "help", it is up to sites to choose what to comply with. There are 200 countries in the world, fair to say that the rules are not uniform at best and contradictory at worst. For example, we are likely violating Iranian law simply by allowing access to gay and adult content, which is a crime there. But our company and sites are not based in Iran, nor in the UK or the U.S.
Interestingly, some of the big adult tech companies have recently started working with age verification providers to create a shared system and set some standards. So yes, the UK going live has definitely stirred the pot. But France also did a lot of heavy lifting by suing some of the large sites, even when those sites were not based in France.
Right now, the space is in flux. But just like with cookie policies, I expect that new standards will eventually emerge.
On our side, we have rolled out a new "Age Gateway" landing page across all our sites, targeted at certain countries. It is built to be flexible and can quickly be adjusted as new requirements or solutions come up.
For ChatFighters, full ID-based verification for every visitor, especially the kind that requires showing a passport or driver’s license, would be difficult. There are simpler methods, especially if a user already verified on another adult site, but those are not always accepted.
The verification itself is not technically hard. Many providers are already government-approved and do not even store data. But each check comes with a cost. And since ChatFighters was never meant to generate profit, that cost becomes a real problem.
For context: a single ID verification can cost around $0.10 to $0.60. That doesn’t sound like much, but if a user is in private mode and visits several times a day without registering, it adds up quickly. Even one user could rack up a few dollars of cost per day. You can imagine how that would scale and quickly price our site out of existence.
In fact, this is what’s happening right now. Many smaller sites simply need to shut down - or roll the dice. Blocking the UK is no real solution either, since similar restrictions have already been in place in other countries for months or even years. The difference now is that enforcement is becoming much more aggressive, even if we are based outside of their legal jurisdiction.
ChatFighters has the luxury of having its big brothers, MeetFighters and WatchFighters, which can buffer some of the costs. But other niche sites might not be so lucky. The little money they make through ad deals simply gets vaporized by the need to verify every visitor. Only a fraction of visitors convert to registered members, and only a fraction of those actually contribute to sites like ours.
And if your monetization model relies on ads, well... how many of you are using ad-blockers?
You can imagine these costs are a massive problem. We are part of this industry and we’ve talked to our partners about it. The fear of being forced to shut down is very much real.
The stunning part is that the cost of verifying each visitor is massively higher than the cost of simply serving content. The cost of loading a site is around $0.0001 to $0.001 per visitor, and global or local caching makes subsequent visits even cheaper.
Now imagine an ID verification per visitor costing up to $0.50 in the worst case, especially when full ID and liveness checks are required. And that is per visit if private mode or other privacy tools are used, which prevent recognizing returning visitors in a compliant way.
As you see, the cost of verifying a user can easily be 10,000 times higher than just letting them load a page. And that is the reality small sites are facing.
And this is only to serve the existing content. We also expect our support costs and development costs to rise in order to integrate and maintain these verification tools. The only cost that does not rise is storage.
That is why it is encouraging that big sites and age-check providers are starting to collaborate to reduce costs and hopefully create a more scalable solution for the entire industry.
It may all end up like cookie popups. Every adult site, including porn, gambling, drugs, and similar content, gets pushed behind a standard age check. Eventually, people just click "OK" and show their ID like it is nothing. That might sound smooth if we ignore the costs, but it also creates a massive opportunity for scammy sites to collect IDs and face data.
Once people get used to handing over their ID to many sites, they might drop their guard and one day submit it to a fraudulent site. And to be honest, if you are forced by regulations to show your ID before you can even access the site, it is not surprising that some users will fall into this obvious trap.
Ideally, a few well-regulated and trusted standards will emerge to prevent that kind of abuse.
The last point: regulations vary wildly. Some require full ID and liveness checks. Others are fine with just a national ID or social security number. Then you have states and countries that offer their own systems entirely. It is practically impossible to stay compliant in every modern country, let alone all countries such as Iran. (You have to pick your battles.)
So yes, we are watching it closely. We are not planning to shut down the service in any countries. Instead, we are rolling out our new "Age Gateway", which is designed to minimize costs on our end while still being as compliant as possible.
We monitor our users, we monitor the regulations, and more importantly, we are looking ahead to potential global solutions.
This is also not the first time new layers of compliance have been pushed down. Cookie policies, data protection acts like GDPR, content moderation rules, copyright reporting systems, Complaints Conditions, Report Policies, and many more have all been introduced in the name of making the internet a safer place.
Our policies page exists purely for this reason. Our actual house rules would fit on a single A4 page. The other 100 pages are there to make you feel safe and to stay compliant.
It is up to you to decide how much safer the internet really is thanks to all the new popups and regulations.
I realize this was a long answer, but I expect more of our users across our sites to have similar questions. That’s why I believe it’s worth going into detail once, so we can refer others to this statement in the future.
Let me know what you think, or if there are any other questions.
Thank you for taking the time to go into this in such detail. It does indeed make you wonder, though I try to keep my tinfoil hat at bay and hope instead that it's simply the result of shortsighted planning. Eh, a guy can dream. In my industry it has coincided with a large censorship push from Visa and Mastercard, delisting a lot of LGBTQ+ content in the process, so it certainly feels like the tides are shifting in an unwelcome direction.
I'm a video game developer and we are also in watch & wait mode, but it seems likely costs will escalate to unsustainable levels for many teams if they are indeed forced to monitor all voice comms 'robustly'.
I guess you refer to the latest censorship on Steam. Which came from the payment providers, aka MasterCard and Visa. This is not new. These credit card companies are some of the strongest and most effective regulators of what is considered allowed adult content. Regardless of which country you are in, you most likely have to please MasterCard and Visa.
Hello! I was curious if CF was planning to make any changes to the site to accommodate the UK's online safety act, which comes into force on 25 July.
Many sites are having to either stop serving the UK (access via VPN), or implement a form of age verification for UK users. The fines for non-compliance are unfortunately huge - £18m - but it remains to be seen if/how it will actually be enforced. It is clearly aimed at big tech, but it is usually small fish who get caught up in the draconian legislation.
Barman
2025-07-26 23:21Thanks for tha landscaping the scenario.
Understandable that could be complex problem.
For users point of view:
A VPN and a country without any age validation would be a massive work around on this topic?
The Tech
2025-07-29 15:23(In reply to this)
"VPN" reported a 1,400 percent hourly increase in signups over its baseline on Friday - the day the UK's age verification law went into effect.
Once again, as outlined below, if the true goal were to protect minors, there would be more effective, and far cheaper, ways to achieve that.
On a completely unrelated note (*cough*), we’re proud to announce our very first affiliate partnership in the history of our websites!
If you’re traveling, you might run into restrictions based on local laws in your holiday destination. With our partner NordVPN, you can easily and securely connect to your home country, and support our site at the same time.
Your support helps us cover the growing costs associated with new compliance regulations.
We’re grateful for your consideration:
👉 Visit NordVPN today!
The Tech
2025-07-26 17:41Oh yes, we are aware of the new laws and have been monitoring them regularly for the past 3 years. The UK is not the first. Similar regulations are already enforced in parts of Europe and in the U.S. on the state level. The UK is just the one going live now, so it’s making headlines. We will see if this ends up being the final drop in the bucket that pushes these rules globally. Right now, it kind of looks that way.
First let's get the obvious out of the way: we are not against making the internet safer for minors. It's a good cause. But we believe this is not what is being done: if helping kids was the goal, the trivial solution would be for websites to declare, in metadata, a minimum age to enter, and devices, set up by parents or guardians, to enforce it. This would "save the children" without infringing on the rights of every adult in the world, and would defeat a whole range of scams and circumventing methods that are now being used to bypass age checks. It would be a robust, clean solution. So you have to ask why this is not being done. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
The current reality is a piecemeal patchwork of regulations that vary wildly from country to country, and even within countries. Some require full ID checks, or liveness checks, credit cards, e-mails, "adult pass" apps, the list goes on. There is a whole industry of age verification providers that have sprung up to help sites comply with these rules. Even with this "help", it is up to sites to choose what to comply with. There are 200 countries in the world, fair to say that the rules are not uniform at best and contradictory at worst. For example, we are likely violating Iranian law simply by allowing access to gay and adult content, which is a crime there. But our company and sites are not based in Iran, nor in the UK or the U.S.
Interestingly, some of the big adult tech companies have recently started working with age verification providers to create a shared system and set some standards. So yes, the UK going live has definitely stirred the pot. But France also did a lot of heavy lifting by suing some of the large sites, even when those sites were not based in France.
Right now, the space is in flux. But just like with cookie policies, I expect that new standards will eventually emerge.
On our side, we have rolled out a new "Age Gateway" landing page across all our sites, targeted at certain countries. It is built to be flexible and can quickly be adjusted as new requirements or solutions come up.
For ChatFighters, full ID-based verification for every visitor, especially the kind that requires showing a passport or driver’s license, would be difficult. There are simpler methods, especially if a user already verified on another adult site, but those are not always accepted.
The verification itself is not technically hard. Many providers are already government-approved and do not even store data. But each check comes with a cost. And since ChatFighters was never meant to generate profit, that cost becomes a real problem.
For context: a single ID verification can cost around $0.10 to $0.60. That doesn’t sound like much, but if a user is in private mode and visits several times a day without registering, it adds up quickly. Even one user could rack up a few dollars of cost per day. You can imagine how that would scale and quickly price our site out of existence.
In fact, this is what’s happening right now. Many smaller sites simply need to shut down - or roll the dice. Blocking the UK is no real solution either, since similar restrictions have already been in place in other countries for months or even years. The difference now is that enforcement is becoming much more aggressive, even if we are based outside of their legal jurisdiction.
ChatFighters has the luxury of having its big brothers, MeetFighters and WatchFighters, which can buffer some of the costs. But other niche sites might not be so lucky. The little money they make through ad deals simply gets vaporized by the need to verify every visitor. Only a fraction of visitors convert to registered members, and only a fraction of those actually contribute to sites like ours.
And if your monetization model relies on ads, well... how many of you are using ad-blockers?
You can imagine these costs are a massive problem. We are part of this industry and we’ve talked to our partners about it. The fear of being forced to shut down is very much real.
The stunning part is that the cost of verifying each visitor is massively higher than the cost of simply serving content. The cost of loading a site is around $0.0001 to $0.001 per visitor, and global or local caching makes subsequent visits even cheaper.
Now imagine an ID verification per visitor costing up to $0.50 in the worst case, especially when full ID and liveness checks are required. And that is per visit if private mode or other privacy tools are used, which prevent recognizing returning visitors in a compliant way.
As you see, the cost of verifying a user can easily be 10,000 times higher than just letting them load a page. And that is the reality small sites are facing.
And this is only to serve the existing content. We also expect our support costs and development costs to rise in order to integrate and maintain these verification tools. The only cost that does not rise is storage.
That is why it is encouraging that big sites and age-check providers are starting to collaborate to reduce costs and hopefully create a more scalable solution for the entire industry.
It may all end up like cookie popups. Every adult site, including porn, gambling, drugs, and similar content, gets pushed behind a standard age check. Eventually, people just click "OK" and show their ID like it is nothing. That might sound smooth if we ignore the costs, but it also creates a massive opportunity for scammy sites to collect IDs and face data.
Once people get used to handing over their ID to many sites, they might drop their guard and one day submit it to a fraudulent site. And to be honest, if you are forced by regulations to show your ID before you can even access the site, it is not surprising that some users will fall into this obvious trap.
Ideally, a few well-regulated and trusted standards will emerge to prevent that kind of abuse.
The last point: regulations vary wildly. Some require full ID and liveness checks. Others are fine with just a national ID or social security number. Then you have states and countries that offer their own systems entirely. It is practically impossible to stay compliant in every modern country, let alone all countries such as Iran. (You have to pick your battles.)
So yes, we are watching it closely. We are not planning to shut down the service in any countries. Instead, we are rolling out our new "Age Gateway", which is designed to minimize costs on our end while still being as compliant as possible.
We monitor our users, we monitor the regulations, and more importantly, we are looking ahead to potential global solutions.
This is also not the first time new layers of compliance have been pushed down. Cookie policies, data protection acts like GDPR, content moderation rules, copyright reporting systems, Complaints Conditions, Report Policies, and many more have all been introduced in the name of making the internet a safer place.
Our policies page exists purely for this reason. Our actual house rules would fit on a single A4 page. The other 100 pages are there to make you feel safe and to stay compliant.
It is up to you to decide how much safer the internet really is thanks to all the new popups and regulations.
I realize this was a long answer, but I expect more of our users across our sites to have similar questions. That’s why I believe it’s worth going into detail once, so we can refer others to this statement in the future.
Let me know what you think, or if there are any other questions.
italian stallion
2025-07-29 01:43(In reply to this)
Thank you for taking the time to go into this in such detail. It does indeed make you wonder, though I try to keep my tinfoil hat at bay and hope instead that it's simply the result of shortsighted planning. Eh, a guy can dream. In my industry it has coincided with a large censorship push from Visa and Mastercard, delisting a lot of LGBTQ+ content in the process, so it certainly feels like the tides are shifting in an unwelcome direction.
I'm a video game developer and we are also in watch & wait mode, but it seems likely costs will escalate to unsustainable levels for many teams if they are indeed forced to monitor all voice comms 'robustly'.
The Tech
2025-07-29 15:09(In reply to this)
I guess you refer to the latest censorship on Steam. Which came from the payment providers, aka MasterCard and Visa. This is not new. These credit card companies are some of the strongest and most effective regulators of what is considered allowed adult content. Regardless of which country you are in, you most likely have to please MasterCard and Visa.
italian stallion
2025-07-25 00:26Hello! I was curious if CF was planning to make any changes to the site to accommodate the UK's online safety act, which comes into force on 25 July.
Many sites are having to either stop serving the UK (access via VPN), or implement a form of age verification for UK users. The fines for non-compliance are unfortunately huge - £18m - but it remains to be seen if/how it will actually be enforced. It is clearly aimed at big tech, but it is usually small fish who get caught up in the draconian legislation.