Comparison of Different Darknet Marketplaces: Listings
One of the main differences between Russian darknet sale of illicit substances and English-speaking darknet is the number of marketplaces. Due to certain historical background, the Russian market wholly belongs to Hydra Marketplace, the hugest darknet website on the whole area of CIS countries and in the whole world (according to Chainalysis, in 2019 bitcoin addresses associated with Hydra received nearly 75% of all world money sent to darknet marketplaces). On the contrary, the English-speaking world has a huge number of different darknet websites that sell drugs. Monopoly here is not possible because of the work of law enforcement and wide geography. While Hydra primarily serves only Russia, such marketplaces as White House Market, Dark Market, and others can work and have many customers and vendors in dozens of various countries.
As far as there are many darknet-websites, as a researcher, I would like to compare them and figure out which marketplace is the biggest, what are the top websites and so on. There are a few ways how to make this comparison. The first that may come to mind is pretty obvious — compare them by the number of sales or feedback left after purchasing different products. However, this action is very complicated. As far as feedback is displayed on thousands of different web pages, it is impossible to collect this information manually. To compare sales, I need to write a unique scraper (special program script that collects info from a website) for each marketplace I wish to analyze. After writing the codes, I need to run them and wait until the data is collected, which may also take some time. Therefore, comparison by feedback is possible but is very complicated and time-consuming. I will definitely do that someday, but for now, I need an easier way.
Other possible options are to compare marketplaces by the number of listings or vendors. These parameters are more accessible than sales. Almost all marketplaces display the number of listings in certain categories on the website. If they aren’t, then an observer can multiply the number of listings on one catalog page on the number of pages to get the whole number of listings. However, with vendors, the situation is more complicated as different marketplaces have different approaches to display this kind of information. Some markets have a separate page with the information about all vendors, some show vendors only on catalogs of listings. So to collect a number of vendors from all the websites, I still need to write web-scrapers. I will certainly do that in the future, but for my first English article, I want something that can be analyzed without coding. Hence, comparing the number of listings is a perfect choice for me.
Once I decided to compare darknet marketplaces by the number of listings, I visited dark.fail and looked for that parameter on each suitable website there. I even decided to include Hydra to show you the Russian darknet markets’ real size compared to English marketplaces. By the way, Hydra was the only marketplace I needed to scrape to understand the number of listings (to be exact, I collected information from nearly 900 pages). All English-speaking marketplaces stored information about the number of products publicly, so in their cases, I grabbed the information without any problems. After analyzing and comparing the gained results, I made the visualization you can see below.
First, it’s important to understand that the number of listings doesn’t obligatory correlate with the number of sales. This parameter directly shows the supply status but doesn’t mean that the demand is the same size. For example, most Dark Market listings I saw didn’t have any sales (or there were a few of them), but with the White House Market, the situation was quite the opposite. It looked to me that WHM was more active than Dark Market. However, the number of listings was greater in the Dark Market (i wish to emphasize that this opinion is only based on my personal observation, the situation in reality may differ). The same situation can be seen with Invictus and Monopoly markets, which both had almost the same one-amount-adjusted listings. On Invictus, I didn’t manually find single feedback (there were even some sellers with 50–100 listings and 0 sales). At the same time, the Monopoly market was full of sales.
With that being said, let’s closely look at the graph. All marketplaces are divided into two groups: the ones that give an option to choose between different amounts in one listing (“Multiple amounts”) and the ones that don’t (“One amount”). There are only three “Multiple amounts” websites — Monopoly (which has this option as clear as possible), Cannazon (which has different webpages for different amounts, but all of the variants are listed on the page of each amount, plus catalog displays only one amount per product) and Hydra (the same as with Monopoly).
I think that introducing an option of choosing between amounts on one page is not really preferred, but is obligatory. “One amount” websites have tons of the same listings, which not only makes them inconvenient to use but also complicates the process of a search. If a regular user on WHM, for example, found an excellent product with an amount of 500 grams, but he/she wants only 5 grams, then he/she needs to go to the vendor page, after scroll down through his listings, and finally, find the listing with 5 grams. On Monopoly or Hydra or Cannazon that can be done in just one click. Do you see the difference? I hope that all marketplaces will understand that simple thing and introduce it on their websites in the future.
On the bottom of the graph with the minimum number of listings, we can see the Invictus market. As I’ve already said, I didn’t manage to find any feedback on that website, though I tried hard. Of course, some sales might have been held there, but I just didn’t manage to get to them. The second marketplace from the bottom, Cannahome, is way more active. The thing with this website is that it only sells cannabis (buds, WAX, vapes) and mushrooms and only in the United States, which is the exact reason why it has only 2645 listings. If, for example, we look at category “Buds” from American vendors on WHM, we will see 1545 listings, while on the Cannahome, there are 1241 of them. Not so different. Cannahome, by the way, is a “one amount” website because it counts all different amounts from one product as separate listings. But you can choose various amounts on one page, so it is like the variant in the middle.
The Monopoly market seemed pretty active to me, though it didn’t have a lot of listings. That might be caused by the reason that Monopoly has a strict selection of sellers. There is nothing much to say about Versus Project, Dark0de, and ToRReZ markets in the context of this analysis. They all had products and vendors with some sales, but I couldn’t figure out which marketplace is the most active. Therefore, to understand that the complex research of sales is needed, and I will certainly do it in a couple of months.
The Cannazon market really has a lot of one-amount-adjusted listings, taking into account that this website sells only cannabis to all countries except the US. If we compare only cannabis listings as I did with Cannahome, then we can see that on WHM, for example, there were ~3700 one-amount listings with buds (including the US), while on Cannazon — 636 multiple-amount listings, which equals to ~3200 one-amount. With hashish, Cannazon was even ahead of WHM, with 1150 one-amount-adjusted listings against 637 on White House. And those cannabis listings weren’t empty! Therefore, I think that Cannazon is the main marketplace in the world to purchase different cannabis products. Surely, right now, it’s just my opinion that’s only based on listings comparison and doesn’t take sales into account, so the reality may differ. I will find that out soon enough!
The top three markets by the number of listings are Dark Market, White House, and Hydra. Hydra is in third place, but pay attention to the fact that it is a “Multiple amounts” website. I didn’t adjust it to the form of “One amount” because other markets would seem very small. But if I do it with the model of multiplying by 5, which I used for Cannazon and Monopoly, then the number of listings would be equal to more than 110 000, almost five times bigger than White House Market and more than two and a half times bigger than Dark Market. And don’t forget that I only collected Hydras’ products from one country, Russia, for that analysis. At the same time, Dark Market and WHM represent listings for the whole world. Now just try to imagine the real size and power of Hydra.
As for the Dark Market, I have concerns about the honesty of that website. It is stated that there are 41 000 listings on the marketplace, but its front end is inferior; most of the listings found by me were empty. White House Market with only 24 000 listings seemed much more active and alive for me than the Dark Market. I just can’t imagine that such an empty and bad-designed website (its HTML code structure is even worse than the appearance) can have so many products. I will definitely look into that question deeper shortly and scrape all the Dark Market products to figure out if they are unique or not. Of course, for that moment, that’s only my personal opinion that isn’t based on statistical facts.
In summary, I think that the analysis of listings brought more questions than answers. We can clearly see that some marketplaces exceed others by the number of products, but that doesn’t tell us much about the most important parameter that actually shows marketplaces’ value — their sales. We can’t understand whether Dark Market is bigger than the White House Market or not; we can’t understand which marketplace generates the most cannabis sales, and so on. I will soon analyze all the listed marketplaces from the perspective of feedback and answer those questions. And I will do it much quicker if you show me that this kind of material is interesting for you, so feel free to like and comment! I hope that you enjoyed my first English article, thanks for reading!
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