Pressure Intensifies as the Pirate Bay Crosses 300 Million Visitors

Everyone else is getting their head blown off. Is it finally the Pirate Bay’s turn?

In the wake of Extratorrent’s brutal shutdown, a funny thing happened. The fattest pig in the pen actually got fatter. That’s because an exodus of torrenting masses flooded the Pirate Bay, looking for an alternative.

Even a high-profile Extratorrent clone started pulling from the Pirate Bay’s directory. And according to traffic details shared with Digital Music News over the weekend, thepiratebay.org is priming to surpass 300 million visitors in June.

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The Pirate Bay has been hovering between 250 and 300 million monthly visitors for most of 2017, according to stats published by SimilarWeb. Now, that traffic figure is set to surge northward.

So is this finally the moment for TPB to get topped?

Tricky question. Because when it comes to survival, the Pirate Bay puts any cockroach to shame.

Amazingly, the Pirate Bay is still standing strong after more than a decade of non-stop attacks, including an all-out raid of the torrent tracker’s entire server cluster. Somehow, the Bay has always crawled out from underneath the rubble, with dedicated developers committed to keeping the pirate flag flying.

But not only has the Pirate Bay survived, it continues to grow to this day. Part of the reason is that numerous pirate destinations have faced abrupt and bloody deaths over the past few years. That most recently includes Extratorrent, but also includes Kickasstorrents, MP3 Skull, and youtube-mp3.org, among others.

All of which has left millions of users scrambling for newer piracy platforms. “With major torrent sites shutting down left and right, TPB remains on top,” Ernesto of Torrentfreak wrote last week, part of a fascinating look at the Bay’s resilience.

Meanwhile, free streaming platforms like YouTube and Spotify continue to erode torrenting’s dominance. All of which raises the question of whether anti-piracy enforcement has truly had an impact on user behavior.