The top 10 most pirated shows of January 2016
The waters were dominated this past month by The Big Bang Theory which "dominated" all three major pirating sites according to SimilarWeb. The return of Shameless on Showtime also caught the attention of pirates around the world. Here are the full charts and analysis.
This month there was a slight methodology change for the Pirate Bay sites. Usually, we track traffic to multiple Pirate Bay URLs but this month several of them were shut down so we only examined thepiratebay.se, which showed a significant amount of traffic.
- December may have been the month of The Flash, but January belongs to Leonard, Sheldon and the gang over at Big Bang Theory. The show absolutely dominated all 3 pirating sites. Last month the show ranked 3rd, 8th and 9th, on the 3 torrenting sites and this month it held the top spot on Kat and Torrentz.eu, and took second place on Pirate Bay.
- The second most popular show across all 3 sites is a tightly contested race between The Flash and Arrow, both DC comics characters. On Kat, The Flash had more viewers than Arrow, but on Torrentz.eu and Pirate Bay, Arrow was the winner, even placing first on the Pirate Bay list.
- DC comics had a great month in general and 2 other shows appear firmly on the top 10s of Torrentz.eu and Kat. Supergirl has been around since October 2015 and has already gained a sizeable audience of torrent users, but more impressive is Legends of Tomorrow which premiered January 21st and ranked 5th and 6th on Torrentz.eu and Kat.
- On January 10th, Shameless premiered its 6th season on HBO, and torrent users were downloading the show in droves. Pirate Bay users led the way with 10% of the traffic share taken by Shameless, while Torrentz.eu and Kat weren’t far behind with 5% and 6.5% respectively.
- Homeland was a big winner last month but after ending season 5 in late December, torrent users have mostly finished downloading the show and it did not rank on any of the 3 lists. This same trend holds true for Fargo, which despite having a great December, only ranked on the Pirate Bay list in 5th.
- Several shows, both old and new, ranked in the top 10s this month and were not in the December rankings at all. These include Shadow Hunters, which premiered January 12th, Billions, which premiered on January 16th, The Blacklist, American Horror Story, The Expanse, Downton Abbey, and The X-Files, which just launched a mini-series after a 15 year hiatus.
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