XVideos was founded in Paris in 2007 by the French owner Stephane Michael Pacaud. XVideos serves as a pornographic media aggregator, a type of website which gives access to adult content in a similar manner as YouTube does for general content.[11][12] Video clips from professional videos are mixed with amateur and other types of content.[11][12] By 2012, XVideos was the largest porn website in the world, with over 100 billion page views per month.[13]
Fabian Thylmann, the owner of MindGeek (now Aylo), attempted to purchase XVideos in 2012 in order to create a monopoly of pornographic tube sites. The French owner of XVideos turned down a reported offer of more than US$120 million by saying, "Sorry, I have to go and play Diablo II."[12]
In 2014, XVideos controversially attempted to force content providers to either pledge to renounce the right to delete videos from their accounts or to shut down their accounts immediately.[14][15][16]
As of August 2021[update], XVideos was the most-visited porn website and the seventh-most-visited website in the world, as ranked by Similarweb.[8]
XNXX, another site owned by WGCZ Holding, was the tenth-most-visited website overall and the second-most-visited website in the adult category by 2021,[17] although competitor Pornhub was ranked one slot above XNXX by 2024. Both XVideos and XNXX were also the world's most-visited websites for virtual reality videos in 2021.[18]
^"Les sites internet les plus visités au monde" [The most visited websites in the world]. fr.statista.com (in French). Claire Jenik. November 2019. Archived from the original on October 18, 2019. Retrieved November 25, 2019.