Did File Sharing Disappear or Decrease Post-Metaupload Shutdown?

Magaupload, one of the world's leading file-sharing and online storage sites, has been shut down for about three week now. Does it mean the file-sharing activity has disappeared or at least decreased?

The answer is no. The file-sharing activity has migrated to Europe, according to DeepField Networks.

The main impact of the MegaUpload takedown? Well, file sharing has not gone away. It did not even decrease much in North America, DeepField reported . Mainly, file sharing became staggeringly less efficient. Instead of terabytes of North America MegaUpload traffic going to US servers, most file sharing traffic now comes from Europe over far more expensive transatlantic links.

As the largest file-sharing service, Magaupload accounted for 34.1% of all file-sharing traffic on Jan. 18, the day before it shut down. The second one is FileSonic, which covers 19.1% of all traffic. And Putlocker, RapidShare, and Vidoezer together account for almost 4%.

Without a doubt, the Internet lost about 2% to 3% traffic in only one hour after the Megaupload shutdown, DeepField said.

After Megaupload shutdown, other similar sites such as FileSonic, uploaded.to, X7.to and UploadBox have ducked for cover. While some of them have shut down completely, others are no longer available for the U.S. users.

However, the Internet file sharing traffic has been significantly re-allocated quickly - just at the end of Jan. 19. DeepField reported that Putlocker gained 27.5% of file sharing on Jan. 19, whereas Other stood at 17.1% and NovaMov accounted for t 14.6%.

Currently, Putlocker, NovaMov and MediaFire have become the top three download services, which store their data mainly in Europe. More files are only being shared across greater distances than before, but they never disappear or even decrease.

It seems the big crackdown had little impact.