A new report from piracy tracking firm MUSO reveals that the piracy landscape continues to evolve. Pirate sites received a staggering 140 billion visits last year, but there's a clear shift from torrents to direct download and streaming sites. Interestingly, traffic to private trackers remains relatively stable.
While there haven’t been any breakthroughs in file-sharing technology in recent years, the piracy ecosystem is constantly evolving.
Torrent sites have traditionally been very popular, but according to a new report published by piracy tracking outfit
MUSO, direct download and streaming sites have taken over.
Using data sampled from over 200 million devices by a leading data provider, the company compiled a detailed snapshot of the traffic that flowed to various websites last year.
In total MUSO monitored traffic to 14,000 of the largest global piracy websites, which were visited a dazzling 141 billion times over a 12-month period.
While overall visits remained relatively stable, there was a major shift away from torrent sites to more centralized streaming and direct download sites.
“Our data shows a rapid change in piracy behavior, with a large movement away from torrent usage, and growth in web based piracy,” MUSO informs TF.
The tracking company exclusively shared several interesting data points from the report with TorrentFreak. Zooming in on torrent sites it shows a clear downward trend in number of visits.
From January 2015 to December 2015 these sites saw a 24% reduction in monthly visits. There was still plenty of traffic left though, as the average monthly visits hovered around 3 billion, totaling 34.8 billion for the entire year.
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