Literotica Review: Still #1 for Adult Erotic Stories?

Updated on:

If you are looking for erotic stories on the web, it won’t be long before you stumble across Literotica.

It is, after all, the home to erotic adult stories.

This free to use adult fiction site celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2024 and retains its popularity as one of the most visited and ‘stickiest’ adult websites in the world. With more than 53 million visitors per month, Literotica is not just a library of written pornography, but an active community taking part in competitions, placing personal ads and sharing the love of adult sex stories.

In a world dominated by fast and easy porn – from VR porn sites to crazy online sex games – is the age of erotic fiction dead?

Or could Literotica still have life in the old dog yet?

In this Literotica review, we take a closer look at one of the longest running adult websites in the world and find out just what makes it so enduringly popular.

What is Literotica?

Literotica review

Originally launched in 1998, Literotica is a free website for users to share and erotic fiction. Members can submit any form of writing from poetry to essays, stories to audio files and even illustrations.

It is a part of the GoStories.com group which was originally created in 1997 and has a sister site, Chyoo.

Chyoo is a Choose Your Own Adventure style fiction site where users can upload their own, open-ended fiction inviting other members (via threads) to complete the story.

literotica review free erotic fiction
Ugly design but explosive free erotic fiction.

How Popular is Literotica?

According to the analytics site SimilarWeb, Literotica is ranked as the 60th most popular website in the global ‘Adult’ category and is ranked 631st most visited site in the world.

Currently, Literotica is receiving more than 53 million hits each month with the predominant audience being from the United States (approx. 50%). The site is also popular in other English language nations including the united Kingdom, Canada and Australia plus countries like India and Germany.

And, it’s not just the sheer volume of visitors which makes this site so successful; it’s also one of the ‘stickiest’ adult sites on the web. Sticky is a term used to describe websites that have content which keeps visitors on their pages for longer and has them returning again… and again.

According to the stats, Literotica visitors hit an average of 9.35 pages per visit and stay on the site for 17.5 minutes! To give you some comparison of how impressive this is, visitors to Pornhub visit a similar number of pages (8.49) but only stick around for about 10 minutes. Of course, it does take longer to read a story than it does to watch a video but, even still, that is one ‘sticky’ website!

What Can You Find on Literotica?

The main purpose and draw to Literotica is primarily the stories uploaded by its users and you can find thousands of pieces of fiction across all imaginable genres and covering most types of sexual fantasy, confessions and topics.

Adult Erotic Fiction

Erotic stories are the site’s ‘bread and butter’ and, in total, there are more than 420,000 unique pieces of erotic fiction available to read or listen to.

The most popular categories of stories are as follows:

  • Erotic Couplings (54825 submissions)
  • Incest/Taboo (44326 submissions)
  • BDSM (33873 submissions)
  • ‘Loving’ Wives (30843 submissions)
  • Non Consent/Reluctance (23366 submissions)
  • Group Sex (22954 submissions)
  • Exhibitionist & Voyeur (19757 submissions)
  • Gay Male (19058 submissions)
  • Sci-Fi & Fantasy (17277 submissions)
  • Romance (16720 submissions)
  • Lesbian Sex (15535 submissions)
  • Fetish (15090 submissions)
  • Novels and Novellas (14396 submissions)
  • Mature (12100 submissions)
  • Interracial Love (12051 submissions)
  • Celebrities & Fan Fiction (11254 submissions)
  • NonHuman (10671 submissions)
  • Transgender & Crossdressers (9495 submissions)
  • First Time Sex (7123 submissions)
  • Mind Control (5605 submissions)
  • Anal (5124 submissions)
  • Non-Erotic (4261 submissions)
  • Toys & Masturbation (3623 submissions)
  • Erotic Horror (3452 submissions)
  • Text With Audio (2935 submissions)
  • Humor & Satire (2679 submissions)
  • Letters & Transcripts (1546 submissions)
  • Reviews & Essays (1117 submissions)
  • How To Guides (944 submissions)
  • Illustrated (741 submissions)
  • Chain Stories (561 submissions)

As well as stories, Literotica also has thousands of submissions of poems, adult comics and erotic art. There is even an Interactive Erotic Stories section where members can join roleplaying forums or get involved with Choose Your Own Adventure style fiction.

review literotica review free erotic fiction

Forums

The other aspect of Literotica that makes it so appealing is the huge community of other members who regularly visit the site and contribute to the forums, bulletin boards, erotic chat and personals sections.

Though an old-school form of social networking the reach of the forums is huge and some posts have been seen by hundreds of thousands of other members,

The personals section, for instance has more than 18 million posts across 30,000+ threads and even offers dedicated forums for BDSM and LGBT (GLBT?) personal ads.

This is a nice offshoot of the main purpose of the site and is probably one of the major reasons for Literotica’s success.

forums literotica review free erotic fiction

Live Chat

As well as having an active community for the more static areas of the site such as the forums, bulletin boards and personals, Literotica has a pretty active, if slightly dated and ‘old school’, chat room feature.

If you’re over the age of 40 and ever experienced chat rooms in the 1990s then there’s not much to report about this version that is any different to 20 years ago.

However, if you are a millennial and have grown up with social networking sites like Facebook then this is a retro throwback that is worth experiencing….if just to show you how the older generation had to get by back in the ‘old days’ when dirty phone lines were still number one!

The original Flash platform has been replaced by an HTML5, mobile friendly design and allows users to interact with one another in a number of different themed rooms.

Like the rest of the site, it isn’t the prettiest of environments to navigate, nor is the most user-friendly but it does exactly what it says on the tin….offers live chat.

Visual Content

Though not known for its pictures, videos or galleries, you can also find a small selection of free visual content on the site that has been uploaded by other users.

Other Content

In addition to the forums and fiction, you can also find

  • Online store selling sex toys
  • Video on Demand services
  • Live Cams
  • Adult Story Videos
  • Weekly advice column
  • Competitions and Author Awards
  • ‘Naughty’ Flash games

What Can’t You Find on Literotica?

The site has very few rules but submissions that relate to any kind of sexual activities that are illegal is banned; this includes anything to do with minors, animals and extreme violence.

You can find a detailed guide to submissions on their site.

Literotica vs The Competition

Whilst Literotica has enjoyed over two decades at the top, there are quite a lot of alternative free erotic fiction sites chomping at the bit for a slice of the action.

Many of these sites offer slicker design and additional ways to keep visitors ‘sticking’ to their pages.

Nifty is perhaps the closest rival to Literotica and was established six years beforehand in 1992. The site still attracts 9 million visitors each month and is ranked the 416th most popular website in the world.

Other contenders for the crown are:

  • Alt Sex Stories Text Repository – 9.45 million hits per month, 1000+ authors and ranked as the 412th most popular adult website in the world.
  • Adult Fan Fiction – 4.3 million hits per month and ranked in the top 100 adult websites in the world.
  • Lush Stories – 5.1 million hits per month, 370,000+ members, 52,000+ stories and ranked as the 900th most popular adult website in the world.
  • BDSM Cafe – 250k+ visitors per month.
  • True Dirty Stories – 300k+ visitors per month.
alternative to literotica review lush stories free erotic fiction

Most of these sites offer a very similar range of categories to Literotica with some specializing in niche areas like BDSM or fan fiction.

You can find our full guide to the best sites like Literotica if you’d like to widen your erotic reading horizons.

What Does Literotica Membership Cost?

Registering as a user on Literotica is 100% free and will allow you to fully access the site, participate in the forums and share your content.

However, the site is monetized in the following ways:

  • Through the sale of sex toys via its online store.
  • Through the sale of its anthology books via stores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
  • Through a white label live cam site powered by VIP cams.
  • Through the purchase of Video on Demand for their VOD store.
  • Through its partners whose banners and links you can find on the website.
  • Through premium porn content via LitTV.

It is worth supporting Literotica, not just to keep this great site going for another 21 years but also to help their mission to support free speech. There is a section of their website dedicated to the causes they help support via donations from the profits raised by the site and include notable and worthy organisations such as:

  • The Freedom to Read Foundation
  • The National Coalition Against Censorship
  • The First Amendment Project
  • The Free Speech Coalition

Literotica Review: Yep, It’s Still Number One!

Literotica is closing in on 25 years of serving the adult fiction market.

And in our eyes, it’s still the best of the bunch.

There is no doubt that with two decades of experience, millions of users and a top 1000 website under your belt that you have earned the right to have your first drink (in the U.S. anyway).

Literotica is a basic website that is pretty simple in design and is almost entirely free from images (with the exception of a few sponsors ads). It doesn’t require any complex registration process for membership and is easy to use.

However, the site has obviously not had any major attention in many years and although the forums are current and active, there are quite a lot of 404s and broken links across other pages.

The fact that the only new content being added to the site comes from its users or from an automatic news feed that filters relevant headline stories, is not good.

is literotica still active
Pages like this which show no activity for over three years beg the question; is Literotica still being updated?

We would love to know more about how active the site’s original owners (Laurel & Manu) are and whether they have any plans for Literotica’s future.

It would be a real shame to lose this stalwart of the adult fiction world but unless some improvements are made, or at very least some basic housekeeping undertaken, then one of the sites many competitors could soon replace it as the #1 website for erotic fiction.

Whilst Literotica may not be as visually appealing as some of the newcomers to the erotic fiction market, it does offer everything you would want from a site that majors in the written word.

Certainly, there is lots to commend the continued use of Literotica and, given that the site is free to use, there is nothing to lose from doing so.

In the meantime, you may want to bookmark some of those sites that are offering alternatives.

AUTHOR PROFILE

Mike Morris

Mike is the Games editor at AdultVisor. He is chiefly responsible for sourcing, playing and reviewing the hottest new adult gaming titles. There aren’t many adult gaming genres that Mike hasn’t dipped his shaggy beard into — from wholesome visual novels to ‘shag-your-step-sister’ porn simulators. He’s contributed to several popular lewd games, working in Ren’py as a techie/scriptwriting jack of all (smut) trades. Mike has also been spotted in the wild at Gamescom, the Tokyo Game Show, and on popular adult gaming forums (F95Zone, LewdCorner). He's our resident porn gaming connoisseur.
Photo of author