2013 has been an eventful year for The Pirate Bay, to say the least.
The site celebrated its tenth anniversary, but with pressure from copyright holders mounting, it had to switch domain names no less than six times.
In addition, the site continues to be censored by courts all around the world, which have ordered Internet providers to block subscriber access to the torrent site.
The idea behind these anti-piracy efforts is that people will eventually stop using The Pirate Bay. Thus far, however, traffic to the infamous torrent site continues to grow, and so is the number of torrents being uploaded.
Over the past year the number of new torrents added to The Pirate Bay went up 50%, and the uploads doubled compared to two years ago.
The bar chart below shows the progress of The Pirate Bay’s monthly uploads. In November 2011, 38,319 torrent files were added to the site, growing to 50,411 the year after, up to 74,195 last month.
In total The Pirate Bay now indexes around 2.8 million torrent links, which point to a variety of content ranging from the latest Hollywood blockbusters to vintage Linux distributions.
A snapshot taken earlier this month reveals that these torrents were being shared by 18,911,877 people, which includes both seeders and leechers.
The chart below, which is based on The Pirate Bay’s categories, shows that video is by far the most-shared content. More than half of all “peers” (10,258,076) share video files, which is 54% of the total.
Audio, which includes music, is the second most-shared category with 17% of all peers, followed by porn (13%), other (6%), games (5%) and software (5%).
The Pirate Bay’s continued growth shows that the site is not suffering much from the recent anti-piracy efforts.
On the contrary, the site is taking concrete steps to counter future blocking and takedown attempts. During the coming year the notorious torrent site plans to go underground, using a peer-to-peer browser which will make it impossible to censor or shut down the site.
Copyright holders won’t sit still though and will use everything within their means to stop The Pirate Bay from expanding.
With the above in mind, it is safe to conclude that 2014 will prove to be another eventful year.
