AS THE most notorious Game of Thrones pirates in the world, Aussies are more than aware the practice of illegal downloading content is alive and well.

Copyright owners might be pushing to bring down torrent websites facilitating piracy, but new statistics show little to no results indicating they are having any real impact.

In fact, statistics from Amazon-owned web traffic data and analytics company Alexa demonstrate something entirely different.

Using a combination of average daily visitors and page views over the past month, Alexa regularly publishes a list of the top 500 global websites.

While the top 75 spots are usually reserved for search engines, social media platforms and the occasional porn site, one torrent website has managed to crack the list.

KickassTorrents is currently ranked at number 70, making it the world’s most popular website for illegal downloads.

The piracy site has climbed from number 151 to its current position, which makes it the only torrent website to reach such popularity since Mininova made the top 50 back in 2007.

In 2008, The Pirate Bay took the lead and remained as the most popular torrent website — reaching as low as 76 in 2011 — before KickassTorrents surged to the top spot in 2015. By the beginning of last year, the torrent site was ranked at 85 and has continued to surge. Given the fact the torrent site is constantly in the scope of anti-piracy crusaders and complies with a large quantity of DMCA take-down requests, its high ranking is testament to the fact people are not steering away from illegally downloading content.

Adding a page load time of 1.438 Seconds — making it faster than 60 per cent of other sites on the list — and a diverse library of content to the mix, it is easy to see why the site is so popular.

Globally, India is the leading country using the service with 27.7 per cent of traffic, closely followed by America with 13.8 per cent of traffic. Australia is much more humble, contributing only 2.7 per cent of traffic worldwide.