Down The List (Part One)

Among the file sharing giants, it is important to recognize the most popular options to understand how and where on the internet people are sharing their creative content.  Luckily, eBizMBA.com tracks insights for some of the most prominent services over the past few months, allowing for a benchmark of traffic.  This week, I will examine some of the less popular approaches, speculating on why they might not be as popular as others based on their current quality of service.  Let's get started.

At number fifteen we have filecrop.com with an estimated 3,000,000 page views per month. this service is closely tied with Rapidshare, a more familiar service to myself, which is barely ahead of filecrop with approximately 3,250,000 unique views per month.  Filecrop allows it's users to peruse the shared Megaupload and Rapidshare public libraries which hosted an array of information, unfortunately including pirated content from around the globe.  Recently, the creator of Megaupload, Kim Dotcom (yes, he changed his last name) was accused by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) of allegedly hosting and embedding over 500 million dollars worth of copywritten content on Megaupload.  I plan to talk about this conflict for another series of posts, however for now just recognize that the RIAA is responsible for the take-down of Napster, Grokster, Limewire, and EACH of these site's users who were responsible for uploading the content.

I find it interesting that the sites at the bottom end of this top fifteen list are more of less carcasses of what was previously one of the most popular websites in file sharing history.  Unfortunately, current intellectual property laws can get lawful content creators' services shutdown in the fight against privacy, a worthwhile discussion that I will touch on at a later date.