In what is a devastating loss to the world’s file-sharers, the legendary Zippyshare will be shutting down at the end of the month. Since 2006, this popular cyber-locker service, like other file-sharing sites such as Megaupload, was frequently used for the storage of unauthorized music downloads and was often a target for anti-piracy efforts.
Cloud Competition, Higher Costs, Lower Revenues
According to the official announcement about the closure, higher maintenance costs and lower revenues make the company’s business model unsustainable. Zippyshare’s owners also mentioned that decreasing usage in recent years due to greater competition from cloud services as one of the other reasons for pulling the plug.
Ad Blockers a Threat for Cyber-Locker Services
The company’s blog post also talked about ad blockers, a major challenge for websites of all kinds. As they stated, sophisticated ad-blocking technology, such as third-party DNS services and browser extensions, greatly reduced revenue and curtailed their ad-based business model.
Another reason for shutting down is the exploding electricity cost to run its servers—2.5 times that of prior year costs. As they explained, the site could no longer be profitable.
Zippyshare Users Mourn Loss of Popular File-Sharing Platform
This is bad news for Zippyshare users, who only have until the end of March to download their files—music, movies and games—before the website goes permanently offline. Old-timers will remember Zippyshare as one of the most popular free file-sharing platforms, with no timers or download limits and faster download speeds than similar services.
Copyright Owners Celebrate Demise of Piracy Site
Far less sad at the demise of Zippyshare are the multitudes of musicians and other copyright owners who have seen their works shamelessly pirated for nearly two decades—in addition to those who have relentlessly tried to combat music piracy and other copyright infringement by removing offending files from the site.
Record Number of Copyright Infringement Complaints
Even in Zippyshare’s final days, the cyber-locker is seeing 45 million site visits each month, putting it in the top 1,000 websites for number of visitors. TorrentFreak reports that during its lifetime, the file-sharing site has had more than 14.5 million requests to remove URLs for alleged copyright infringement.
Techspot – 21 March 2023 – Kishalaya Kundu
[Note: GrayZone has taken down thousands of files on behalf of our clients from Zippyshare over the years.]