PornHub purging all the content they did is remarkable, and certain kinds of content on the site are all but gone. They've likely lost a lot of viewership that way.
This stands out as the single worst thing I've ever seen on their site: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/this-is-why-ill-...
Summary: Author whines about customer support experiences and makes an ass of themselves, then realizes that all their griping wasn't even necessary because if they had performed some basic troubleshooting they would have realized the problem was elsewhere all along.
As for Pornhubs viewership, I don't think it will go down much. I imagine a large part of their audience just goes to the site and clicks on what looks good to them, maybe filtering by category or searching, but still, they see what's there and they click.
Also in a roundabout way, since now everything on the site is either from their parent company, a partner company, or someone in their model program they are in control of all revenue and are more probably more likely to see people pay for content from their model program members, which they get a cut of.
As for Ars, they used to have a journo that would publish 10+ page reviews of the latest Mac OS release, and the dude had an extensive knowledge of Apple and Apple products. In a past life I was a journo for one of their competitors for a few years and my EIC was always pointing to Ars as our rival and competitor to take inspiration from. When our publication went downhill I turned to Ars to get the reporting that I wanted, and it feels like that well dried up a few years ago.
In-depth technical articles replaced with inspiration porn and geek fan service. They went from being a slightly-less-nerdy Anandtech to a slightly geekier BuzzFeed or TechDirt
Fuck Conde Nast!
John Siracusa. He left Ars ~5 years ago, I think. Even after I switched away from OS X, I would still read his reviews.
The absurdity of it is that there was a small minority of animated and computer generated (non-voice acted) nude "dance" videos featuring 3D models. Those were also removed, but likely unintentionally. You can't 'verify' stock 3D models, created from beginning to end by a single person.