Piracy sites explode in popularity after being blocked - You'll never guess how many visitors they received!

Research into blocking piracy

In recent years, website blocking has become one of the most widely used anti-piracy mechanisms in the world.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in dozens of countries are preventing subscribers from accessing a variety of "pirate" sites. Although new blocks are added every month, research into the effectiveness of these measures is rather limited.

One of the first academic studies, based on British data, showed that local blocking of Pirate Bay had little effect on legal consumption. Instead, pirates turned to alternative pirate sites, proxies or VPNs to bypass virtual restrictions.

Further research has added further detail and given hope to rights holders. The research showed that once a large number of sites were blocked in the UK, overall traffic to pirate sites decreased. At the same time, researchers observed an increase in traffic to legal services such as Netflix.

Several reports have also suggested that traffic to the domains decreased after the blocks were put in place. This seems logical, since blocked sites should be more difficult to access. However, new research published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) suggests that this is not always true.

The WIPO alert database

WIPO is interested in the effectiveness of site blocking because it organizes and maintains the WIPO Alert Database. This initiative gathers information on blocked domains in various participating countries, such as Spain, Greece, Italy, Korea, Peru, Lithuania and Russia.

This online blocking repository can be used by various intermediaries to voluntarily blacklist copyright-infringing sites worldwide. Advertising companies, for example, can use it to ensure that their clients' advertisements do not appear on problematic sites.

To assess the effectiveness of site blocking, WIPO commissioned the piracy tracking company MUSO to compare traffic to the domains of pirate sites, before and after they were blocked. The research was funded by the Republic of Korea, whose data also formed part of the study.

New research shows surprising results

The results of the study were published by WIPO earlier this month in MUSO's "Unauthorized Application Report". While there are no definitive conclusions to be drawn, there are some intriguing details worth highlighting.

Firstly, it seems that traffic data for most of the blocked domains is missing. Of the 6,573 domain names in the WIPO alert database, MUSO only has usable traffic data on 432 domains. This includes estimated visits to the site 90 days before and 90 days after it was blocked.

An analysis of these 432 domains shows that, as might be expected, almost 73% of all blocked sites saw their traffic decrease after the blocking orders were issued. This clearly shows that ISPs ordered to restrict access to pirate sites are working.

"The data shows that a significant proportion of blocked domains received few or no visits after being blocked. Specifically, 15.7% of blocked domains had no visits at all after being blocked," says the report.

"In addition, 41.4% of the blocked domains have either 90% of their visits before the blocking date, or no visits at all after their blocking. This might suggest that blocking copyright-infringing domains is an effective measure to reduce traffic to these piracy domains."

Traffic has increased for some

What is not specifically highlighted is the fact that over a quarter of all blocked domains recorded more visits after being blocked by ISPs. In other words, piracy has increased for these sites.

Surprisingly, 56 domain names only received traffic after being blocked, which is strange, to say the least.

The impact of blocking measures differs considerably from country to country, some being more effective than others. In Italy, for example, all domain names received fewer visits, but with a sample of just one occurrence, this doesn't mean much.

Regional differences

Looking at the countries with a representative sample, we can see that in the Republic of Korea and Russia, around 73% of all domains receive less traffic after being blocked. This is comparable to the worldwide average.

Nearly half of all blocked sites in Korea recorded more than 90% visits before blocking, or no visits at all after blocking.

In Lithuania, on the other hand, traffic to pirate sites remained largely unchanged or even increased after the blocking orders were issued. As the graph below shows, almost half of the domains recorded the most traffic after being blocked.

The report doesn't offer any definitive conclusions, but MUSO informs Toukiela that if these traffic trends say anything about the success of site blocking, Russia and Korea are the most effective.

We also contacted WIPO for their opinion on the report, but the organization says it is still studying the results internally.

Additional searches

Overall, the work of WIPO and MUSO to measure and understand the effectiveness of site blocking is a positive development. However, the report also raises some questions. Is it possible that external factors partially influenced the results?

Firstly, MUSO used a fixed blocking date for each country, as provided by WIPO. However, in general, courts allow ISPs to block sites within a given window after an order has been issued, so it's possible that some domains may still be accessible after the recorded blocking date.

This delay would explain why people continue to visit the sites, and traffic may even have increased if these blocking orders made headlines locally.

In addition, it would be useful to have a broader sample of domains for future research. In the current report, over 93%s from all domains were excluded because they were not included in the MUSO data source, or because there simply wasn't enough traffic data.