Re: <nettime> Copyright Is Over – If You Want It

[nettime's avid reader <nettime@kein.org>]

Pirate Bay Traffic Doubles Despite ISP Blockades
July 17, 2014

https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-traffic-doubles-despite-isp-blockades-140717/

In recent years the entertainment industries have pushed hard to get
The Pirate Bay blocked in various countries. Despite these efforts the
notorious torrent site has managed to double its visitors. The United
States remains the most popular traffic source while roughly 9% of all
users access the site through a proxy.

The Pirate Bay is without doubt one of the most censored websites on
the Internet.

Courts all around the world have ordered Internet providers to block
subscriber access to the torrent site and this list continues to
expand.

Denmark was one of the first countries to block The Pirate Bay, but
the biggest impact came in 2012 when major ISPs in the UK and the
Netherlands were ordered to deny their users access to the site.

The entertainment industries have characterized these blockades as a
major victory and claim they’re an efficient tool to deter piracy. The
question that has thus far remained unanswered, however, is how Pirate
Bay’s traffic numbers are being affected. Is the site on the verge of
collapsing?

As it turns out, The Pirate Bay hasn’t stopped growing at all. On the
contrary, The Pirate Bay informs TorrentFreak that visitor numbers
have doubled since 2011.

The graph below shows the growth in unique visitors and pageviews over
the past three years. The Pirate Bay chose not to share actual visitor
numbers, but monthly pageviews are believed to run into the hundreds
of millions.

These numbers reveal that the torrent site is still doing quite well,
but that doesn’t mean that the blockades are not working. After all,
the additional traffic could simply come from other countries.

A better indication for the effectiveness of the blockades are the
number of visitors that access the site through proxies. The Pirate
Bay told TorrentFreak that roughly 9% of all visitors use proxies.
This percentage doesn’t include sites that cache pages.

In other words, a significant percentage of users who don’t have
direct access to the site are bypassing court-ordered blockades though
proxies.

Interestingly, the United States is by far the biggest traffic source
for the notorious torrent site. This is somewhat ironic, as American
record labels and movie studios are the driving force behind the
blockades in other countries.

All in all it is safe to conclude that censorship is not the silver
bullet to stop The Pirate Bay. While it certainly has some impact,
there are still millions of people who simply route around the
blockades and continue downloading as usual.








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