New data has confirmed a migration to alternative torrent sites after the sudden and unexpected shutdowns of two of the top three most-visited such sites in the world, Kickass Torrents and Torrentz, earlier this summer.

The biggest players in the area, the Pirate Bay and Extratorrent, benefited the most from the shutdowns, but other sites also made huge gains in traffic in the wake of their former rivals' disappearance.

The torrent world was thrown for a loop starting back in July, when Kickass Torrents — which, at the time, was the most popular website in the world of its kind — was shut down by the U.S. government, leaving millions of users searching for alternatives.

Among the most popular substitutes was the world's largest torrent meta search engine Torrentz, which initially received a huge traffic surge immediately following the Kickass Torrents shutdown. Shortly thereafter, however, Torrentz shut itself down voluntarily, presumably because of owner concerns that it would suffer the same fate as Kickass.

That left even more torrent users in the lurch, with two of the three biggest websites of their kind suddenly becoming inaccessible to their users. While many alternative clones and mirrors of the two lost sites soon appeared — some of which were legitimate, some of which were not — many torrent users instead migrated to other sites.

With the dust having settled somewhat, Similarweb has compiled data measuring more than 200 million desktop visits, which indicates that, as expected, the two sites that have benefited the most from the loss of Kickass Torrents and Torrentz have been the two other biggest players in the field, the Pirate Bay and Extratorrent.

While the Pirate Bay surged by 67 percent and gained the most users overall because of its size, Extratorrent actually benefited even more percentage-wise, doubling its users almost overnight with a 101 percent increase in usage. RarBG, 1337x.to and YTS.ag, the third-, fourth- and fifth-most popular sites after the shutdowns, achieved user increases of 45 percent, 53 percent and 44 percent, respectively.

Some smaller sites, however, experienced a decrease in usage. The loss of users was tied to the demise of Torrentz, which, as a torrent meta search engine, provided traffic to those sites as part of its search results. With a huge resource no longer directing traffic to their sites, torrent providers such as Torlock have seen their user numbers cut in half.

"After KAT we saw a massive increase but I assume that was because Torrentz received much more traffic when KAT went down," according to Torlock's operator. "Because we were very reliant on Torrentz when it shut down, it basically halved our traffic. So currently we are half of where we were before KAT and Torrentz shut down."

What the overall data appears to indicate, however, is that torrent users haven't been flustered by the site shutdowns. Rather than stopping their usage, it seems they have quickly moved on to file-sharing alternatives, just as they have since the demise of previously-popular sites such as Napster, Kazaa, Demonoid and the like.

It looks like file-sharing continues at a similar pace, despite the fact that some torrent users' favorite sites no longer exist, as there are always others more than willing to fill the void.

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