The Pirate Bay raid is still sending shock-waves through the BitTorrent 'community' but despite the prolonged downtime people haven't stopped sharing. Statistics provided by one of the largest trackers used by TPB show that the number of continuous file-sharers remains pretty much unaffected.

There is no denying that The Pirate Bay played a central role in the torrent ecosystem.

As one of the few well-moderated sites it was the source for dozens, if not hundreds of other torrent sites. And with millions of visitors per day the site also had the largest user-base.

With an event like this, one could expect that BitTorrent usage would have been severely impacted, but it appears that people have found their way to one of the many alternatives.

TF reached out to the operator of Demonii, the tracker that was used for all Pirate Bay torrents, and it appears that the Pirate Bay raid isn’t affecting its traffic much.

“Not much is happening differently on our side due to the TPB downtime. I cannot see any anomalies or differences,” the Demonii operator told us.

“Since all the torrents are pretty much mirrored by KickassTorrents and Torrentz, it seems that the downtime hasn’t stopped people from downloading or uploading at all,” he adds.

The connections per minute to the Demonii tracker remain relatively stable, hovering around the 25 million mark, with a peak during the weekends. The graph below shows the pattern for the past week with the Pirate Bay raid (last Tuesday) included.

Demonii weekly stats



The monthly graph suggests that traffic over the past several days has been a fraction lower than the weeks before, but the impact is relatively low.

“In terms of connections we are looking at roughly 2,880,000 connections per minute at peak hours and about 2,160,000 connections per minute at the lowest,” Demonii’s operator says.

Demonii month stats



If The Pirate Bay remains down for a longer period of time problems may arise on a different level though. TPB has traditionally been one of the best moderated sites, which helped to prevent malware and other scams from spreading.

In theory others could take over this role, but if more sites topple the quality element may become an issue. For now, however, most people seem to be sharing as much as usual.