In recent months Rapidshare has aggressively targeted search engines and indexers that abused the company’s trademark and facilitated copyright infringement. These actions are part of their campaign to create goodwill with the entertainment industry, but by doing so RapidShare is also shooting itself in the foot. As a result of the domain seizures the site is no longer the leading file-hoster.
“The domains they have seized were sending significantly large amounts of traffic to their service, which converts into paying customers, and makes RapidShare.com good money,” Jesse told TorrentFreak. “We know for a fact that a lesser-known file locker will garner about 10-15 paying customers for every 10000 that show up to their download page.”
We have no doubt that this was taken into consideration by RapidShare, but we have to assume that the company feared even worse if they didn’t go after the ‘infringing’ domains.
The result is clear though. After having led the file-hosting business for several years, Megaupload has now surpassed RapidShare as the most visited cyberlocker. Just a year ago RapidShare was among the 15 most visited domains on the Internet together with Google, Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia, but it has meanwhile dropped to 86 according to Alexa.
Competitors Megaupload, Hotfile, 4Shared and Mediafire all surpassed Rapidshare in terms of traffic this year.
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