I just found this report from February which gave a fresh set of statistics about use of tor hidden services by category.
I downloaded the original paper and added it into Wikipedia, calculating percentage service against their data set to be compared with the previous ones.
Category | Description | Instances in study | As percentage |
---|---|---|---|
Violence | Hitmen for hire and instructional material on conducting violent attacks | 17 | 0.3 |
Arms | Trading of firearms and weapons | 42 | 0.8 |
Social | Online communities for sharing illicit material in the form of forums social networks and other message boards | 64 | 1.2 |
Hacking | Hackers for hire trade or distribution of malware or DdoS capabilities | 96 | 1.8 |
Illegitimate pornography | Pornographic material involving children violence animals or materials obtained without participants' consent | 122 | 2.3 |
Nexus | Websites primarily focused on linking to other illicit websites and resources within the darknet | 118 | 2.3 |
Extremism | Content espousing extremist ideologies including ideological texts expressions of support for terrorist violence militant how-to guides and extremist community forums | 140 | 2.7 |
Unknown | 155 | 3.0 | |
Other illicit | Materials that did not easily fit into the other categories but remain problematic such as trade of other illegal goods and fake passports or Ids | 198 | 3.8 |
Finance | Money laundering counterfeit bills trade in stolen credit cards or accounts | 327 | 6.3 |
Drugs | Trade or manufacture of illegal drugs including illegally obtained prescription medicine | 423 | 8.1 |
Other | Non-illicit content such as ideological or political content secure drop sites information repositories legitimate services | 1021 | 19.6 |
None | Websites which were either completely inaccessible or otherwise had no visible content including websites which hosted only placeholder text indicating that their operator had yet to generate indicative conten | 2482 | 47.7 |
When you consider key data points like Drugs only being 8.1%, you maybe able to double the figure based on the almost 50% unknown services. This places it at 16.2%, a small increase from the January 2015 figures of 15.4%.
TL;DR Drugs & Cybercrime
Even scarier, I was lurking the deepest depths of the darknet and found a penis enlargement forum, even bigger than alphabay! It had millions of posts about how to secretly enlarge your penis, in ways that the clearnet could never understand.