4shared, the largest English language file-sharing site, is serving 2.5 billion pageviews alone every month, and this number is increasing rapidly.

Below we have compiled a list of the top 10 largest (general purpose) file-sharing sites on the Internet, based on measurements by Google. What stands out immediately is that 8 of the 10 sites are related to cyberlockers, and only 2 are BitTorrent sites.

This picture is quite different from the landscape 5 years ago when BitTorrent sites dominated the file-sharing space. Early 2007 Mininova was the first BitTorrent site to earn a place among the top 100 most-visited sites on the Internet, and soon thereafter they were joined by The Pirate Bay.

In the years that followed BitTorrent sites continued to dominate, but in the background cyberlockers were catching up, and catching up fast. Where most BitTorrent sites were seeing moderate growth, several new cyberlockers saw their traffic surge. In the last year many cyberlocker sites have outgrown The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, isoHunt and other popular torrent sites.

Below is the full list of sites based on Google’s ranking. We have to note though that several site owners in this list told TorrentFreak that the monthly pageviews and unique visitors are hugely underestimated. The Pirate Bay for example claims 1,500,000,000 pageviews, which is more than double the Google estimate. Other sites report similar ‘downgrades,’ so overall the ranking would still hold.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Today, legal implementations of BitTorrent are not new anymore. The BBC, Sky and NTL are using BitTorrent to spread movies and TV-shows. The MPAA signed an agreement with BitTorrent to fight “illegal” filesharing. Allpeers, a BitTorrent extension for the popular browser Firefox just received a huge sum of money. BitTorrent inc. is even opening its own online video store.

The legal opportunities are endless. People might want to focus on that instead of blaming a tool for things that might be illegal somewhere.

Like Sacha Wunsch-Vincent, an OECD economist in its IT division states

“Peer-to-peer technology will be among the essential components of everyday communication … chilling its legal use is like being against the steam engine in the 19th century,” said .

Even Adrian Strain, a spokesman for the music industry’s lobbying group, the IFPI said

“Everyone agrees that P2P is a fantastic technology but we will have to see whether it can be successfully converted into a legitimate and commercially viable business model,”.

So stop suing and get to work!

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.