A giant porn website with more than 1 million registered members has been shut down and more than 2,000 people were arrested by the Ministry of Public Security.

The porn website, "MM Apartment," with its Web server in the US, had been in operation since 2009 and published about 8 million posts on its forum, 90 percent of which contained lewd content, pictures and videos, the Beijing Times reported.

The record-breaking website shocked the public for its huge number of users and the number of people who have been arrested.

The Ministry of Public Security launched a crackdown on porn sites in 30 provincial and regional jurisdictions including Beijing. A total of 2,148 suspects have been arrested. In Beijing 77 people were arrested. They were all men and 34 are government workers or employees of institutional units.

A site user and forum moderator nicknamed "Shisanshao" was quoted by the Beijing Times as saying that members could gain access to the content either by paying for it or by contributing pictures and videos. "The more you posted, the more content you could watch," he said.

"Porn websites depend largely on the loyalty of its members. Foreign experts have researched people's loyalty to different kinds of websites, which shows that porn websites are the most attractive." Lü Benfu, vice dean of the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told the Global Times on Monday.

Porn constitutes 30 percent of global Internet flow, and the browse rate of the world's biggest porn website receives as many as 4.4 billion hits per month, reported extremetech.com.

"Low costs and high profits are the motive for website founders that open illegal porn sites in China," said Lü. "A high click rate leads to greater advertising profit."

According to the Beijing Times, one porn operator with over 400 websites under its name earned a profit of 15 million yuan.

"There are loopholes in supervision on Internet censorship, which allow porn websites to set up servers in the US and open them to Chinese Web users," said Xin Haiguang, an IT industry commentator, without explaining why the government simply can't block them.

Authorities have to better regulate Internet service operators and telecom service providers that fail to strictly manage websites in their domain, Xin noted.