According to the report from MarkMonitor, enterprise brand protection firm, sites offering allegedly pirated digital content draw the lion's share of the 53 billion annual visits, whilst sites selling counterfeit goods, including prescription drugs and luxury goods, generate more than 92 million visits per year.
The report claims that the amount of traffic generated by these sites - as well as the range of locations used to host and register them -indicates the complexity in finding a solution to the global problem of online piracy and counterfeiting.
MarkMonitor says that global piracy affects a wide range of digital content, including movies, music, games, software, television shows and e-books.
The firm estimates that the world-wide economic impact of online piracy and counterfeiting at now running at $200 billion annually.
Frederick Felman, MarkMonitor's chief marketing officer, said that, in the online world, unlike the physical world, supply and demand are virtually limitless.
"It is [therefore] imperative to understand both online distribution channels as well as digital promotional vehicles in order to develop effective mitigation strategies", he said.
"Examining traffic patterns and geographic information are vital in identifying and prioritising enforcement actions rather than playing 'whack-a-mole' with egregious offenders", he added.
The report claims to show that 67% of sites suspected of hosting pirated content are hosted in the US and Western Europe.
Delving into the report reveals three sites - rapidshare.com, megavideo.com, and megaupload.com - as generating 21 billion page views per year.
In total, says the report, sites classed as potentially involved with digital piracy generated around 146 million page views every day.
The report has drawn outrage from some of the sites mentioned. The Inquirer newswire quotes RapidShare as saying the report was "read with incomprehension" and calling the report "defamation."
"RapidShare is a legitimate company that offers its customers fast, simple and secure storage and management of large amounts of data via our servers" a RapidShare official told Nick Farrell on the newswire.
Infosecurity notes that the porblem that sites like RapidShare face is that they require users to only upload digital files that are not copyrighted and, where copyright infringement is suspected, then the files are removed.
This has not stopped some users from exchanging copyrighted files, however - a quick search of the RapidSearchEngine website, for example, reveals that several users have uploaded copies of the latest Tron Legacy movie, something which is expressly forbidden under RapidShare's terms and conditions.