Pirate Sites, Billions of Visits, Wiped Out in Hours: Sifting the Fmovies Wreckage

Fmovies was once the world's most popular pirate streaming site. Then mid-June, after years of smooth sailing, it vanished into thin air. Sites with over a billion annual visits tend not to throw everything away so easily. Yet last night, a site with close to two billion visits disappeared in similar circumstances, rapidly followed by another, and then many others after that. In the absence of an official announcement, earlier today we took an early sift through the wreckage.

 With an estimated 190 million visits in March 2024 alone, few pirate streaming sites have ever come to close to the popularity of Fmovies.

How it was even possible for an unlicensed platform to attract so much traffic is closely linked to Fmovies’ uncanny ability to stay almost perpetually online, year after year. Potential answers to these questions lie in a rich pool of circumstantial evidence; one that promises much but always seems to fall short when it comes to the crunch.

Fmovies and Associated Sites Fall Like Dominoes

Whether the full and unedited Fmovies story will emerge anytime soon is unclear. However, perhaps the most intriguing aspect, and potentially the most sensitive, is how in a matter of months, Fmovies went from being almost impossible to shut down, to literally shutting down overnight.

We outlined a few of our theories last month, concluding that Fmovies was almost certainly pushed. The precise circumstances under which that pushing took place are elusive, but we’re certainly looking forward to finding out.

Likewise, it will be interesting to learn how the demise of Fmovies in the middle of June, led to many sites connected to Fmovies changing domains (presumably in an effort to stay online), only for those sites and others to collapse so dramatically during Monday night.

Interestingly, others much closer to this pivotal event claim to be in the dark too.

Radio Silence

Posting on Reddit a few hours ago, an individual posting under the heading “from Aniwave admin” said that they’re also being kept in the dark.

“The Site’s owner has always been pretty disconnected from us, rarely giving us a heads up or any information in advance. Could the site have actually gone down? Yes, it’s possible- some sister sites have closed down recently. But it’s also possible that something happened and they lost control of the site,” Sorrow-San explained.

“None of us here have direct contacts with the team responsible for the site outside of intermittent emails once in a blue moon…..Those of us capable have reached out to our contacts to get information on what’s going on, but- frankly- for the time being we just don’t know.”

The true course of events may not see daylight anytime soon. However, after sifting through the wreckage today, we’ve put together a summary of sorts, detailing the casualties linked to the events of Monday evening and other data that aims to explain their significance.

Billions of Annual Visits

The exact nature of the Fmovies network isn’t easily explained. Fmovies itself hasn’t been too difficult to track over the years; however, sites either run by the same operators or those connected by platform or content, have had a tendency to become a maze of domain and/or brand changes.

The existence of clones and imposters doing roughly the same thing hasn’t made things any less complicated, so it’s entirely possible that the table below is incomplete or will require other amendments. That being said, the traffic volumes of these sites speak for themselves, especially when considering that some didn’t even exist a few weeks ago.

Without full knowledge of the circumstances and background to the shutdowns, predicting what may come next would be little more than guesswork. What seems almost guaranteed, however, is a sudden influx of sites claiming to be the official replacement or reincarnation of those in the table below, ready to pick up where everything left off.

Whether any of those claims have any basis in truth is an entirely different matter.

Source

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