eDonkey is a distant second, with 20% share, despite hosting almost 900,000 users and 77 million files at any given time. Once-popular Gnutella is ranked third, with a market-share in the single digits.

But file-hosting is growing much faster, Ipoque said, already enabling between 15% to 35% of digital piracy, depending on the region of the world.

DeMarines said he expects file-hosting sites to eventually supplant P2P. "P2P is on its way down. They're too visible, and so the copyright organizations are going to take these BitTorrent tracker sites out," he said.

Other long-running methods for distributing warez are either stagnant or shrinking. Usenet newsgroups, for instance, have lost popularity due to the large amount of pornography and malware mingled in with the warez, DeMarines said.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is "not favored" as a way to transmit files, though announcements and links on IRC to warez hosted on file-hosting sites is growing, DeMarines said.