MiniNova users leave the site on a massive scale after ‘big cleanup’

After Bittorrent portal Mininova removed links to copyrighted material from her site, visitors have left the site en masse. This is revealed by an Envisional study that monitored traffic on Mininova before and after removal of infringing content.

On November 26th 2009, Mininova removed from her popular portal all links to infringing content. In doing so, Mininova followed the verdict of the court of Utrecht of July 2009. The judge ruled that Mininova was responsible for the infringing behaviour of its users and ordered the site to remove the infringing content.

The effects of the ruling and Mininova’s actions were immediately clear:

Before the removal of the links, Mininova was the most used torrent site in the world. The site was visited by four million unique users every day. These visitors together ordered almost nine million searches. After removal of the infringing links, the number of visitors declined until less than an million a day. The number of searches decreased to around two million.

The effect of the ‘big cleanup’ was even more dramatically visible with the downloads. In its heydays before November 26th, Mininova facilitated over ten million downloaded files a day. This number shrunk twentyfold to about half a million files. The number of available torrents collapsed from 1,3 million to less than 10.000, a decline of over 99%.

After Mininova had lost the vast majority of its torrents, there was a temporary decline in the worldwide bittorent traffic. The first four weeks after the big cleanup, the number of visits to the top 20 torrent platforms had decreased by 10%. In the first week of January 2010, however, the amount of traffic on these 20 platforms had grown with 3,75% compared to four weeks before the link removal.

From a methodological point of view, it is good to keep in mind that all statistics that we treat as absolutes, are in fact relatives: Alexa measures traffic to a site as a fraction of total Internet traffic and not as absolute numbers. This means that the real percentages with which traffic to individual sites has changed, may differ from the percentages quoted if the total amount of Internet traffic was different on the moments of measure (thanks, Ernesto).

The biggest winner is The Pirate Bay, which is now the most used torrent site. The site saw the number of users grow by 47%. Other strong growers are Isohunt, Torrentz.com and BTJunkie.org. Torrentreactor is the only one that also faced a decreasing number of visitors.

These data are relevant for the global discussion on downloading and put the arguments of both file-sharing supporters and adversaries in a new light. The fact that less than one per cent of links on Mininova was “legal” puts pressure on the argument that many people use file-sharing for sharing legitimate files. Furthermore, the abrupt decline in the number of users seems to suggest that downloaders are primarily interested in the entertainment industry’s content rather than in alternatives. Of course, this conclusion can only be drawn for individual sites and not for Bittorent as a protocol. The figures from the report further reveal that the removal of infringing content has had little effect on the total Bittorent traffic. Users apparently easily find alternatives. This could change on the longer term as the most important alternatives for Mininova are facing legal problems.

23 March 2010