Soap2Day, one of the most popular movie and TV show pirate streaming sites on the Internet, says it has closed down ‘forever’
Official domains including soap2day.to, soap2day.ac, soap2day.sh, soap2day.mx, s2dfree.to, s2dfree.cc, s2dfree.de, s2dfree.is, s2dfree.nl, plus the site’s domain uptime advisory pages at soapgate.org and soapgate.cc, all display the same shutdown message.
Hello guys: We have decided to close soap2day forever. We are very sorry 🙂 Bye – Soap2day Team
Other than the message above, the Soap2Day team has provided no additional details on the site’s sudden demise. Whatever the reasons, issues with traffic levels and visitor numbers seem unlikely to be part of that equation.
Soap2Day Was a Pirate Success Story
Despite web blocking, domain downranking in search engines, and other anti-piracy measures, Soap2Day was one of the big ‘pirate streaming’ success stories of recent years, with traffic trending upwards and massive visitor numbers every single month.
Traffic has been improving all year; 84.2m visits in January, 93.6m in February, with figures for March and beyond even more impressive.
To put these traffic levels into perspective, Soap2Day received more traffic than the recently closed RARBG, 30 million more monthly visits than leading torrent site YTS (and by extension every torrent site in the top 10 most-visited sites list), and around 10 million visits more each month than streaming giant FMovies.
Given the above, it seems relatively safe to conclude that Soap2Day did not shut down due to a lack of popularity. Two domains used by the platform to notify users of official URLs (soapgate.org and soapgate.cc) received 12 million visits per month combined, yet neither offered any content for streaming.
So What Killed Soap2Day?
Soap2Day and similar large streaming sites face continuous pressure from global anti-piracy groups exerting pressure using various means, internationally and locally.
Late 2021, Hollywood and Netflix obtained a High Court injunction to block Soap2Day domains in the UK along with a similar order early February 2022 in Australia and an expansion a few months later.
The Motion Picture Association and Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment obtained a subpoena in the United States that aimed to unmask the site’s operators in March 2022.
As data from SimilarWeb shows, Soap2Day’s traffic in the United States made it a go-to location for movie and TV show fans, potentially at the expense of licensed platforms operating in the same market.
In October 2022, Hollywood reported Soap2Day to the United States government. The higher traffic levels reported at the time were due to the MPA combining various Soap2Day domains but perhaps the most interesting comment is the linking of Soap2Day with operators in China.
Soap2Day also found its way onto the UK’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit’s ‘Infringing Website List’ last October and just weeks later, was again targeted in a DMCA subpoena obtained by Hollywood.
Beware of Strangers Bearing Gifts
In common with RARBG, copycat sites claiming to be Soap2Day already exist in huge numbers and that volume is only likely to increase in the days and weeks to come. At the time of writing, based on loose calculations, there are at least 480 ‘Soap2Day’ branded domains in circulation.
Random tests on 50 of those domains in the past few hours revealed more than 20 attempts to dump malware. Anyone looking for Soap2Day alternatives should therefore be aware that movies and TV shows aren’t the only gifts on offer from would-be Soap2Day replacements.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
