Submissions were judged by "a rotating team of women-identified judges, made up of fans, porn stars, journalists and xHamster employees." Starting 1 September, amateur and professional women-identifying filmmakers could apply for grants in the range of $500 to $10,000. The films will be made available for free and without interest claims from xHamster. While other major porn sites have sought in recent years to appeal to women viewers, xHamster appears to be the first major porn site to offer monetary incentive for this. In September 2018, the website released an interactive online guide map, titled “Legendary Porn Theaters of NYC,” marking the most famous porn locations in 1970s New York City. Many of the sites were shut down by the city in the 1980s and included theaters that screened pornos, massage parlors, and adult bookstores. One year after the 2017 Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, xHamster released data showing that traffic to the site from Puerto Rico was down by one-fifth compared to pre-hurricane levels. Vice President Alex Hawkins claimed the lag in viewership indicated that the country, in contrast to some claims made by officials, had not yet returned to pre-hurricane standards of normalcy, including both reliable access to electricity and privacy. Connected with right-wing Youtubers, Reddit groups, memes on 4Chan, and pseudoscientific health benefits of abstaining from porn and masturbation, #NoNutNovember (or #NNN) is a viral abstinence “campaign” or monthlong “challenge” begun in 2017. While xHamster did report a slight dip in user traffic from late October to early November 2017, they also reported a slight increase in site traffic in November 2019; Alex Hawkins attributed the increase to heightened public awareness of masturbation throughout the month of November. In 2018 xHamster launched a counter No Nut November campaign called “Nut November,” which they promoted with the hashtag #yesfap. On 6 November the site posted to its Twitter account that they began to receive hateful messages and well-designed death threats in response to its counter campaign, including an image reading “Pornographers must die.” After Danish photographer, Andreas Hvid, published a controversial photograph of himself and an unnamed woman lying naked on the Great Pyramid of Giza in late 2018, xHamster tweeted in support of Hvid, encouraging him to continue his pornographic pursuits with the help of the site. In a “photobomb” stunt at the 2019 Golden Globes, Kelleth Cuthbert, a Wilhelmina model and brand ambassador for Fiji Water, went viral on Twitter by repeatedly appearing behind actors on the red carpet.