A fall in online piracy: Search traffic to torrent websites down by a third in 2020

The rise of media streaming platforms like Spotify, Netflix, and others might have served to retard the demand for pirated content on the Internet. Demand, however, peaked in 2020, with more people cooped up indoors. The economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic further meant that spending power was also at an all-time low. Pirate sites lost a fair bit of traffic in 2020, and an analysis of yearly trends show that an update to Google’s search engine helped repel online piracy, with visits to pirate sites down by roughly a third.

In the halcyon days of file-sharing, most media downloads took place on applications such as Limewire and Napster. Later, when the first torrent websites began mushrooming online, some users switched to these closed communities and indulged in peer-to-peer file transfers. Some of these torrent websites were open platforms that made money on advertisements. Rapid adoption became a goal, and piracy rode piggyback on search engines to reach more people.

Search engines helped widen the reach of pirates’ distribution networks, much to the chagrin of copyright holders. There have been many petitions to ban links, direct download portals, and illegal streaming platforms from being discovered through web search. Google down-ranks websites that receive a large number of takedown requests and its renewed push to curb piracy has hurt traffic to such websites in a big way this year.

According to data from MUSO, a London-based organisation that tracks online piracy, the traffic to torrent streaming and download sites between December 2019 and November 2020 reduced by around 10% when traffic emanating from search engines was excluded. However, data from Europe reveals that there was a spike in traffic to torrent sites in the immediate aftermath of nationwide lockdowns imposed in Spain, France, and Italy.

The spike, however, was temporary, and flattened out by June. The graph showing traffic to such sites from search engine referrals paints a more accurate picture. Between December 2019 and November 2020, search traffic to torrent sites dropped by roughly a third. Despite a temporary spike coinciding with the onset of the pandemic, search engine referrals to torrent sites fell drastically by May.

Moreover, these figures reflect the impact of the two major algorithm changes announced by Google in 2019, which became effective on January 14 and May 4. Notably, search traffic to pirate sites dropped by over 20% in May. The company did not mention explicitly that changes to its search algorithm would target piracy, the data collated by MUSO shows a clear correlation.