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Blockades shmockades: Pirate Bay traffic reportedly doubles since 2011

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Despite many efforts by anti-piracy campaigners to take down and/or marginalize the Pirate Bay, the site’s Web traffic has increased by 100 percent in the last three years alone, TorrentFreak reports.

Even though the Pirate Bay has come under heavy fire in the form of blocks in multiple countries, including the U.K., Denmark, and the Netherlands, both the site’s number of unique visitors and page views have been rising steadily since 2011, and there’s no reason to believe that this will change anytime soon. Though the Pirate Bay declined to share exact figures, but it is estimated that their monthly page view numbers are in the “hundreds of millions” range.

So how can the Pirate Bay’s popularity be increasing if ISPs and nations are blocking access to it? Simple: with the use of proxies. The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak that roughly 9 percent of the site’s visitors do so with the use of proxy server or service.

While organizations like the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America have been some of the hardest firms pushing for blocks of Pirate Bay and other sites like it, much of the traffic that the site gets originates from here.

A lot more will have to be done to sink the Pirate Bay’s ship, and even then, the site, its users, or both will probably just take yet another detour, and keep sailing right along.

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Konrad Krawczyk
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Konrad covers desktops, laptops, tablets, sports tech and subjects in between for Digital Trends. Prior to joining DT, he…
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