For those of you who have been living in a cave, this might be news to you. The Pirate Bay, one of the world’s most popular websites for illegal downloading of movies, has increased its traffic by more than 300% after Swedish police shut down the site for three days. They are back up and running, but for how long, that remains the question.
Having all this traffic is however nothing more than a flash in the pan if we look at the graph attached from Alexa. Looking at the stats, we note with interest that the traffic is running back down to where it was before the raid. The average “Page Views per user” is coming back down as well as its reach.
The splurge in traffic is more like a traffic accident. It makes the news headlines that the might one has fallen and everyone wants to take a look. Curiosity and little else. The sort of traffic it was experiencing can only be described as a passing phase.
Many questions still arise. There is no such thing as bad publicity. It is free and depending on how you use it, publicity is publicty. During the take down phase while The Pirate Bay had been moving, it would have been far more productive with all the extra amount of traffic and eyeballs to have stated to people why they beleived that they had been in the right and why they believe that software, movies and music should be free. None was forthcoming however! As I stated publicity is only good when you know how to use it.
Using the age old argument that TPB is just a search engine like Google is more than a little thin. Torrents make up 99.99% of TPB whereas Google might list the search sites itself. The purpose of TPB is to search for torents, whereas Google will search for everything. Google was not designed for one specific task such as TPB. Possibly an illegal task depending on who you ask.
Could the RIAA have managed the take down better? I would think so. Firstly they took down an entire datacenter. That was not a good move as it alienated more people than would have been needed to start a mob. Was it the Swedish Police who made the error of taking every server available? Who knows.
What does come out of the ruins of the take down was the theories being ignited that this was a warning to all datacenters around the world. If you colocate a torrent tracker, be prepared to loose ALL your business. Who knows, only the ensuing lawsuits will make it clear as to why so much damaged had been caused.
