Aloha. In Hawaii, it's a word that means both hello and goodbye, and I can't think of a more fitting name for this site because about five minutes after saying hello to AlohaTube, I was already itching to say goodbye. I've reviewed a lot of sites in my time, the good, the bad, and the ones that made me question my career choices. AlohaTube's gay crossdressing section lands firmly in that last group. But you're here for an honest review, so grab a coconut drink, because this is going to be a bumpy ride.
The niche itself deserves better. It's a niche where presentation matters, where the outfit is half the fun. Crossdressing is all about guys in stockings, skirts, wigs, and lipstick, rocking a look that takes confidence and a bit of style. So it is a bit ironic that the site serving it has not gone through any makeovers or updates since the early days of dial-up. Yikes.
Welcome back to the early days of the internet
Ah, the good old days when the only social media that was floating around was MySpace. The internet back then had a very specific vibe to it, and I have to say that the design of AlohaTube definitely brings back a lot of those memories from the early 2000s. The whole olive-green background and a grid of thumbnails crammed together like someone was trying to fit all of them on a single page is certainly something that you would find back in the old days.
I even remember that some of the biggest sites of today looked exactly like this, or at least very similar, back in the early days of the internet. If you were to look at this today without any internet history knowledge, you would say that it looks like it was built by someone's nephew for a school project, then left on a server and forgotten about for twenty years.
There's a counter at the top bragging about over 21 million total porn movies on the site, plus how many were added last week and today. I'll give it this much. Those are big numbers. But big numbers on a page that looks like this feel a bit like a homeless guy telling you he needs a tenner and will return it immediately because he is secretly loaded. You want to believe him, but everything else about him says otherwise.
I know some of you don't care about looks as long as the porn is good, and I respect that. The problem is that the outdated design isn't just ugly. It makes the whole site harder to use, and as you'll see, that's only the beginning of the trouble.
If you squint your eyes, you will see 10.000 gay crossdressing videos
The page proudly tells you there are 10.000 gay crossdressing videos, spread across 100 pages of 100 videos each. A perfectly round 10.000 is already a bit suspicious, since it looks a lot more like a limit the site stops counting at than an actual count. When I saw this for the first time, I rolled my eyes. But fine, I might as well start checking out the videos and see what kind of value they bring to the crossdressing table.
Surprise, surprise, it does not take long before a problem arises. What is the problem? One of the worst fucking sins a porn site can do. Repeating fucking videos. On the very first page, even. After scrolling for just a bit, you will start to see that some thumbnails repeat. This is utterly disappointing, but I saw it coming. I mean, it doesn’t take a fucking rocket scientist to know that after so many red flags, a shit show is coming your way. So, already, I can safely say that the 10.000 videos are not a real thing. Just like me, you probably hate being played, especially by something that looks like AlohaTube.
Are you sure these are gay crossdressing videos?
It does not take Sherlock Holmes to notice another problem, which is the bleeding of other niches. Sure, crossdressing is quite obscure, and it should be expected that there is some bleeding here and there. But, considering the previous issue of repeating videos, and the obviously fake number of 10.000 videos, bleeding on top of that makes things even worse.
A huge chunk of what shows up under gay crossdressing has nothing to do with gay crossdressing. You'll find bisexual scenes, femdom scenes with a woman running the show, and plenty of videos where nobody is wearing anything that even resembles an outfit. It's like the search engine saw one word it recognized and threw in everything vaguely related, plus a few things that aren't related at all.
There is real crossdressing content in there. I won't pretend otherwise. You'll find guys in skirts, thongs, and full dress-up looks if you dig. But you'll have to dig hard, because they're scattered between so many unrelated videos that browsing feels like looking for a matching sock. But instead of looking for that sock in a drawer, you are browsing a dumpster, and that dumpster is on fire. All this time, you might be thinking that there are filters that might solve this problem. Well…about that.
On most sites, even the ones that are outdated, there are at least some ways that you can narrow down your search. But on AlohaTube, this is fiction, a story, a myth, a legend - it does not exist. I suppose you can switch between top-rated movies and new movies, but would you call those filters? I guess I glorified them in some of my reviews, so technically they count, but you cannot filter by duration, dates, category matching, or anything else.
With 10.000 videos, a pile of duplicates, and a ton of bleed, your only tools are the order the videos come in and your own eyes. Want only HD? Hah! Good luck with that. Want something longer than a two-minute clip? Better check each thumbnail for the timestamp. Want to filter out the scenes that don’t belong? Keep scrolling and hope you don’t get fooled by a thumbnail. I could keep going, but you get the gist of it by now.
Sneaky redirecting strikes again
You probably thought that this site couldn't get more confusing. Well, buckle your seatbelt, because the ride is about to go turbo. At first, this seems like an ordinary tube site. Well, ordinary is a stretch since it really stands out. However, it is an aggregator site in disguise. The thing is, it will not always redirect you to the source of the video.
Sometimes when you click on a thumbnail, you are going to be sent to a page with a player on AlohaTube, and you can play the video there just fine. But sometimes, you will immediately be sent to some random website where you can either get a lucky pull like xHamster, which does not have that many ads, or you are going to get something like HotMovs, where there are all kinds of ads, including the shameless premium option under “free download.”
This gets even more confusing, as certain videos open on AlohaTube, but then when you play the video, you are redirected to a different platform. I have seen a lot of shit, but AlohaTube definitely is an odd one out when it comes to playing things by the rules, because it does not follow any fucking rules. It’s like playing some kind of gay crossdressing video roulette, especially since you will feel like a winner as often as you would on actual roulette, but with the only option being to bet on the numbers.
Time to say aloha to this one
I always try to find something good to say about a site, and with AlohaTube, this is really tough.
The overall site is huge, and the 10.000 really looks impressive at first, especially for gay crossdressing. However, the bad sides start coming in really fast, and they do not hold back any punches. It looks extremely outdated, has no filters to help you narrow down the content, repeats videos and thumbnails, uses sneaky redirects that can shower you with ads, and has all kinds of other issues I mentioned throughout this review.
Honestly, it is really hard to give this one a pass, since there are just so many better options out there. Still, if you have checked out everything else, and if you happen to have the patience of a saint, AlohaTube does have some good sides. You can find some great hidden gems, especially in the gay crossdressing genre, which might be its only saving grace, and the only reason why I can recommend that you check it out.
