The survey by MarkMonitor, an anti-fraud company, looked at 43 filesharing sites and found that they clocked up 146m visits each day.

Between them, the leading three sites - RapidShare, MegaVideo and MegaUpload - accounted for 21bn visits a year, indicating that the majority of users are drawn to a handful of sites.

The MarkMonitor report only looked at site traffic levels and did not analyse the number of illegal downloads per user or even if any of these visits ...