R18

R18 is a premium porn site that primarily sells a-la-carte downloads and streaming privileges of Japanese adult videos, but also offers a group of excellent and expensive all-inclusive subscription plans. The was founded in 1999 as a domestic Japanese porn distributor, but in recent years has become a rising force selling Japanese adult videos to the western market, too.

Too Good To Be True?

The way that R18 is set up is essentially perfect, and it’s a struggle to come up with any way in which its presentation and navigation could be improved. When you enter the site, you’re immediately greeted with a helpful display of content presented in chronological order. From here, the options are nearly endless, and each works perfectly to provide you with a simple and effective way to get to the scene you desire. You can sort and filter via popularity and price, then scroll through the films, watch trailers, read cast listings. These options alone would be sufficient and are already better than what many sites offer, but they hardly scratch the surface of the multitude of choices that R18 gives you. If you would rather dive into subgenres and niches, the Categories tab should help you out. By grouping the selections into broad themes and subcategories, this section allows you to quickly find a very specific subgenre, while also not overwhelming you with too many choices or offering too many nearly-empty categories. The Series tab is similarly useful. Within this section, you can sort movies by popularity, release date, or in alphabetical order, and even click to follow a specific series so that you’re able to watch new episodes as soon as they’re released. If you’ve grown fond of a specific Japanese porn producer, the Studios tab may become your home base on R18. Like the categories and series tabs, this page allows you to navigate and sort through releases by studio, enabling you to explore the R18 catalog in nearly any way you see fit. The Actresses tab rounds out the selection, offering yet another way to sort through the massive amount of content on R18. If this all wasn’t enough, these various options all work together perfectly through R18’s advanced search function. Not only will the text search comb through each video’s title, description, categories, tags, and cast listing, but you’re also able to use a combination of any of this metadata to filter through the catalog with ease. In just a few clicks, you can narrow down the site’s enormous catalog to find the exact type of video that you’re looking for. While this would be welcome on any porn site, it’s absolutely essential on one with as much content as R18. The only complaints that one might raise about R18 are subjective. Since the porn here is produced for the Japanese market, it may not meet Western tastes. Many videos are censored, all of the dialog is in Japanese. If censored porn is your sole objection to Japanese Adult Video there are quite a few uncensored scenes on the site, which can be easily found by searching, but if you require dialog to enjoy porn, you’ll be totally out of luck (unless you speak Japanese). There are very few advertisements on R18. The only exceptions are ads that may actually interest you—things like discounts on R18 videos or cheap memberships to third-party porn sites—so this really isn’t as much of a negative as ads often are. What’s more, the ads are just small banner or sidebar ads, and not those pesky pop-ups or pop-unders that get in the way of a positive porn-viewing experience. So while it is true that R18 is not ad-free, this shouldn’t dissuade anyone from using the site.

But There’s A Catch

The above minor quibbles aside, the biggest downside to R18 is its cost. The average visitor to R18 will not view its content under a subscription service, like they would with most other sites, but will instead either rent or purchase individual videos a-la-carte. The cost of these scenes vary greatly—some are as cheap as a dollar, some are as expensive as one hundred dollars, and a vast majority lie somewhere in between, average about ten dollars per scene. When you take into account that these are all high-quality professional productions with an average run-time of an hour the value isn’t terrible, but it’s still far more expensive than most porn sites. Purchasing a video on R18 allows you to stream it on your desktop, mobile phone, or even on a Roku TV, while also allowing you to download the scene. If this is too expensive, you can also rent week-long streaming privileges to individual videos at a rate that’s usually about half the cost of the purchase price. If you can’t dedicate much of your budget to porn but still like what R18 has to offer, the sale section might be your best bet. There aren’t nearly as many choices here when compared to the overall catalog as a whole, but the sales change frequently, so by checking back often you should have many chances to find what you’re looking for. If this style doesn’t work for you, R18 also offers a huge number of different subscription services that they refer to as channels. As of now, there are seventeen to choose from. Each channel contains a different subset of videos. Some are themed to include all content by a certain producer (such as the Prestige channel or the Soft on Demand channel), while others focus on subgenres of Japanese adult video (such as the Amateur Girls channel or the mature women channel). These channels don’t come cheap. In line with the expensive a-la-carte pricing, the cheapest among them costs about twenty dollars per month, while the more expensive channels approach fifty dollars per month. Thankfully, each and every channel does come with a two-day trial offer that costs just one dollar, so trying out these premium products isn’t as big of a financial risk as it could be. For a truly VIP experience, R18 even offers something called the All Channel Pass, which might be the most expensive and extensive subscription in all of porn. This grants users access to each and every video across each one of the seventeen channels of R18, totally over a quarter of a million full-length Japanese adult videos. As one might expect, however, this premium product comes with a premium price tag: the All Channell Pass costs a whopping eighty-plus dollars per month. This all-inclusive subscription service also comes with a cheap two-day trial, so be sure to try it out just to be safe before committing to this expensive treat.

Excellent But Expensive

R18 has excellent Japanese adult videos on an excellent site, but it knows it. As such, with this perfection comes a high price. If R18 cost what most porn sites cost, it would be in the running as the greatest porn site of all time, but even with its premium price, it commands respect and consideration. That being said, using R18 can cost triple what the most expensive plans on most porn sites cost, or even as much as ten times their yearly rates. Sure, the price can be reduced with one of their more affordable subscriptions or by renting scenes a-la-carte, but this hugely reduces the amount of content that you have access to, too. If R18’s quality didn’t match its price, it would be easy to say that paying upwards of fifty to eighty dollars per month for porn is ridiculous. But, shockingly, R18 manages to pull it off and make such a high price seem reasonable. If you’re not absolutely in love with Japanese adult video, for better or for worse, with all of its appeal taken alongside all of its drawbacks, the price is probably too high to be worthy of consideration. If, however, you’re a fan of the subgenre, the site gets so much right that it earns a recommendation from Pornsites.com as possibly the best Japanese porn site ever created, and even one of the best porn sites altogether, full stop.