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1. No US law requires a warning page.
2. Congress has asked publishers of explicit content to use such a page in the interest of protecting kids.
3. There's a practical and common sense benefit to a warning page with an "agree" button and that purpose is to bind visitors to a contract, a contract that presumably advantages the site owner. You won't get far telling a judge that a site visitor is bound to your terms of service just because you posted one. Contracts require agreement - or at least acceptance, and a warning page "agree" button gives you at least an argument.
4. A warning page can amount to a digital no trespassing sign, which just might provide some advantage to a site operator if there is a particular class of visitors he wants to exclude and have legal leverage over them. Say, reporters and journalists or maybe others who are doing an investigation for professional or - can I say this in public? - official reasons. Yes, they are private property, and the owner can limit access as he sees fit to private property.
5. Not all tube sites are the same. But some have been way beyond shady and it would not be in the the character of the worst to spend much time thinking about the law, even when it just might help them.
6. The conventional wisdom is that anything that interferes with impulse drives visitors away and decreases traffic, be it a warning page or a 2257 notice. That's actually controversial, but many, many believe it. And that's why lots of operators forgo it.
Question answered?
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Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice. . . Restraint in the pursuit of Justice is no virtue.
Senator Barry Goldwater, 1964
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