Understandably, Mininova’s traffic took a huge hit in the last week which is likely to continue in the months to come. For most other torrent sites, however, 2009 has been a successful year with growing visitor numbers all around.

We have compiled below a list of the 25 most-visited torrent sites as of today. Only public and English language sites are included. The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete, Alexa and SiteReport’s World Rank. The number of daily visitors and page views are estimates.

#1 THEPIRATEBAY.ORG - Daily Visitors: 4,467,074 - Pageviews: 26,177,054 (5.86 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #104 - Compete Rank: #787 Visit Site | Full Report
#2 TORRENTZ.COM - Daily Visitors: 2,656,483 - Pageviews: 12,963,637 (4.88 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #180 - Compete Rank: Currently Not Available Visit Site | Full Report
#3 ISOHUNT.COM - Daily Visitors: 2,461,643 - Pageviews: 16,566,857 (6.73 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #186 - Compete Rank: #1,226 Visit Site | Full Report
#4 MININOVA.ORG - Daily Visitors: 1,406,653 - Pageviews: 6,597,203 (4.69 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #96 - Compete Rank: #1,123 Visit Site | Full Report
#5 BTJUNKIE.ORG - Daily Visitors: 1,321,113 - Pageviews: 6,143,175 (4.65 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #403 - Compete Rank: #2,286 Visit Site | Full Report
#6 TORRENTREACTOR.NET - Daily Visitors: 898,167 - Pageviews: 1,796,334 (2 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #391 - Compete Rank: #1,500 Visit Site | Full Report
#7 TORRENTDOWNLOADS.NET - Daily Visitors: 888,663 - Pageviews: 1,581,820 (1.78 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,086 - Compete Rank: #3,477 Visit Site | Full Report
#8 MONOVA.ORG - Daily Visitors: 622,539 - Pageviews: 1,512,770 (2.43 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,736 - Compete Rank: #11,068 Visit Site | Full Report
#9 EXTRATORRENT.COM - Daily Visitors: 594,026 - Pageviews: 2,952,309 (4.97 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,199 - Compete Rank: #5,760 Visit Site | Full Report
#10 BTMON.COM - Daily Visitors: 551,256 - Pageviews: 1,025,336 (1.86 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,754 - Compete Rank: #7,009 Visit Site | Full Report
#11 KICKASSTORRENTS.COM - Daily Visitors: 489,477 - Pageviews: 1,830,644 (3.74 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,129 - Compete Rank: #6,178 Visit Site | Full Report
#12 VERTOR.COM - Daily Visitors: 418,194 - Pageviews: 857,298 (2.05 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,365 - Compete Rank: #6,821 Visit Site | Full Report
#13 EZTV.IT - Daily Visitors: 408,690 - Pageviews: 948,161 (2.32 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,751 - Compete Rank: #16,064 Visit Site | Full Report
#14 SUMOTORRENT.COM - Daily Visitors: 384,929 - Pageviews: 869,940 (2.26 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,737 - Compete Rank: #6,039 Visit Site | Full Report
#15 ALIVETORRENTS.COM - Daily Visitors: 361,168 - Pageviews: 664,549 (1.84 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,555 - Compete Rank: #8,391 Visit Site | Full Report
#16 FENOPY.COM - Daily Visitors: 346,911 - Pageviews: 655,662 (1.89 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,494 - Compete Rank: #6,825 Visit Site | Full Report
#17 TORRENTPUMP.COM - Daily Visitors: 342,159 - Pageviews: 1,064,114 (3.11 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,880 - Compete Rank: #10,954 Visit Site | Full Report
#18 TORRENTHOUND.COM - Daily Visitors: 270,876 - Pageviews: 436,110 (1.61 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #3,108 - Compete Rank: #9,589 Visit Site | Full Report
#19 TORRENTPORTAL.COM - Daily Visitors: 266,124 - Pageviews: 548,215 (2.06 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,878 - Compete Rank: #8,045 Visit Site | Full Report
#20 DEMONOID.COM - Daily Visitors: 247,115 - Pageviews: 274,298 (1.11 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,728 - Compete Rank: #5,927 Visit Site | Full Report
#21 ZOOZLE.NET - Daily Visitors: 218,601 - Pageviews: 655,803 (3,459 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #3,144 - Compete Rank: #71,461 Visit Site | Full Report
#22 SEEDPEER.COM - Daily Visitors: 218,601 - Pageviews: 375,994 (1.72 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,912 - Compete Rank: #7,548 Visit Site | Full Report
#23 TORRENTZAP.COM - Daily Visitors: 194,840 - Pageviews: 490,997 (2.52 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #5,252 - Compete Rank: #22,348 Visit Site | Full Report
#24 YOURBITTORRENT.COM - Daily Visitors: 190,088 - Pageviews: 321,249 (1.69 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #8,541 - Compete Rank: #20,391 Visit Site | Full Report
#25 SEARCH-TORRENT.COM - Daily Visitors: 171,079 - Pageviews: 501,261 (2.93 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #4,831 - Compete Rank: #132,233 Visit Site | Full Report

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Since it is technically unfeasible to pre-approve or filter every potentially infringing torrent file, the Mininova team decided to throw in the towel and only allow torrents to be submitted by approved uploaders. This move resulted in the deletion of more than a million torrents, many of which were not infringing any copyrights at all.

Thankfully, there are still plenty of alternatives for those BitTorrent users who are looking for the latest Ubuntu, OpenSUSE or Fedora release.

Below we provide a random list of public torrent sites that are still open, but there are of course hundreds more sites we could have included. If your personal favorite is missing, feel free to post it in the comments below – preferably with your reasons why it should be included in any upcoming lists.

If you’re looking for high speed downloads, you might also want to check out Usenet.

1. Torrentzap

2. Vertor

3. ExtraTorrent

4. KickassTorrents

5. BTjunkie

5. Monova

7. isoHunt

8. yourBitTorrent

9. The Pirate Bay

10. ShareReactor

Update: The owner of Monova, told TorrentFreak that he has reserved all Mininova usernames for people who want to make the switch to his site. The account names can be claimed here. Also, we replaced some sites in the original top 10 because they went down or started to serve trojans,or viruses.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Despite this success, The Pirate Bay operators today decided to pull the plug and close down the tracker permanently. The evolution of the BitTorrent protocol has made trackers redundant they say, as BitTorrent downloads work well with trackerless solutions such as DHT and PEX.

“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well,” the Pirate Bay crew write on their blog.

Aside from this shutdown, there is also another major development quietly under discussion.

TorrentFreak has learned that behind the scenes the Pirate Bay operators are talking to other BitTorrent site owners to encourage them to follow suit and completely ditch torrents in the future. BitTorrent has reached a point where trackers and torrents are no longer needed to download files successfully. Supported by all of the major BitTorrent clients, DHT and PEX can handle the transfers and Magnet links can largely replace traditional torrent files.

“We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT+PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally – like pick a date and all agree ‘from this date, we’ll not support torrents anymore’,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak.

Switching to trackerless and torrentless downloading on public BitTorrent sites does indeed seem to be an option. Previously, many people thought that BitTorrent would collapse if a dominant tracker like the Pirate Bay went down, but this doomsday scenario never unfolded. In fact, the recent downtime of the tracker did not slow down or stop many transfers, as DHT and PEX seamlessly took over.

Those BitTorrent users who don’t want to go trackerless just yet can of course still use OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent, or indeed one of the many other alternative trackers currently available.

Whether or not The Pirate Bay and others will move away from torrent files in the future, the closure of the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker is nevertheless a milestone in the history of the Internet. Starting today, the Pirate Bay has changed its tagline from “The world’s largest BitTorrent tracker” to “The world’s most resilient (magnetic) BitTorrent site.”

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The link uses the torrent hash and DHT to download content and allows for additional trackers to be added. Thus far, most BitTorrent users have ignored this alternative download method, but thanks to the Magnetiser Firefox add-on, this might change.

The idea behind the add-on is simple. It allows users of meta-search engines, such as Torrentz.com, to download a torrent’s magnet link without having to go to an external site where the torrent is hosted.

“I’ve recently written an add-on for Firefox that generates magnet links for torrent pseudo-indexers that don’t host torrents but does list them by their hashes. So far it supports Torrentz and isoHunt, but the code is simple and could be extended to any searchable indexer that shows the info hash either in the URL, or on the torrent page,” the coder of the add-on told TorrentFreak.

Once the add-on is installed, users can click the ‘magnetise’ link at the bottom right of their Firefox window when they are on a torrent detail page on Torrentz. This will launch a new window that will prompt you to pick the torrent client of your choice.

We have to say that this usage of magnet links is a great idea, and it works like a charm. Not only does it save time, it also comes in handy when a torrent is no longer available on the external site. The only downside is that the title of the download as it appears in your client will not be very descriptive.

The add-on is not available on Firefox’s add-on section just yet, but those who want to try it can download this xpi file and drag it into the Firefox browser window. After it’s installed users can add additional trackers, but since it includes the most-used trackers by default, this is not really needed.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

When writing this article we were faced with a problem. Technically there isn’t really an alternative to Demonoid, as the site acted both as a private and public tracker with a library of hundreds of thousands of user uploaded torrent files. We have to admit that the sites listed here don’t quite compare to the ‘late’ Demonoid, but when combined they go someway to filling the gap for those struggling for ideas.

We previously listed 25 Pirate Bay alternatives. Because many of these could also serve as Demonoid replacements we decided not to include any duplicates here, hence the absence of sites such as Mininova, isoHunt and Torrentz. Here are some of the options that Demonoid users have while the site is down. If you’re looking for high speed downloads you could also consider to try Usenet instead (our Usenet guide).

Join another private tracker

The Internet is populated with thousands of smaller BitTorrent trackers that require users to signup, mostly through an invite system like Demonoid’s. Luckily for those new to the private tracker phenomenon, there are always a few dozen sites that allow newcomers to join without being invited. We’ve listed 5 of these sites below, more are available at Btracs.

1. TorrentZilla

2. TorrentsForAll

3. All4Nothin

4. Midnight-Torrents

5. ThePeerHub

Switch to Public BitTorrent Indexers and Meta-Search Engines

One of the downsides of most (smaller) private trackers is that they don’t offer as many torrents as Demonoid did. Those looking for more obscure or niche content are often better off at one of the public torrent indexes or meta-search engines. We’ve listed 5 lesser known torrent sites below. Although these are perfectly suited to find the latest torrents, we have to admit that their existence relies on other torrent sites like The Pirate Bay and Mininova (where they get torrents from), and public trackers such as OpenBitTorrent and PublicBT.

6. KickassTorrents

7. yourBitTorrent

8. TorrentDownloads

9. AliveTorrents

10. RSSTorrents

We understand that this list isn’t complete, we could have mentioned isoHunt’s new project Hexagon and there are many other torrent sites we could have included, but we have a secret weapon – the readers of TorrentFreak – who can list alternative sites by the dozen.

So, in the spirit of sharing, if you know a public or private site which is open for signups that is not already listed here or in our Pirate Bay alternative article, we encourage you to list it in the comment section below.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Today a very interesting and somewhat unexpected angle to iiNet’s defense was revealed by the ISP’s barrister, Richard Cobden.

Earlier AFACT had insisted that iiNet did nothing to discourage its subscribers from downloading copyright material and therefore condoned their behavior, but it seems that the studios aren’t exactly blameless when it comes to encouraging the use of BitTorrent.

It now appears that the studios themselves were a source of potential confusion experienced by new BitTorrent users when they were trying to decide (if they were aware at all) what is ok to download and what is not when using the protocol.

Cobden told the court that several of the plaintiffs and members of the MPAA had previously entered into contracts with BitTorrent Inc, the source of the official BitTorrent software.

Furthermore, the logos of these studios appeared prominently on BitTorrent.com and also on Mininova, leading Cobden to declare that the studios “….have engaged, at least from the logo on BitTorrent Inc, in the promotion of BitTorrent, the vehicle for all infringement in this case.”

Cobden then went on to show how a user would go about obtaining the BitTorrent client, noting the above-mentioned logos were placed directly under the ‘free download’ link for the official BitTorrent client.

Once the client was downloaded, the user was then prompted to start searching the web for things to download, but despite the contracts between the studios’ and BitTorrent Inc, nowhere did it indicate that users should not download the studios material, said Cobden.

Downloads of pirate material could be found a couple of clicks away from the studios logos, he added, including links to Torrentz.com and Mininova. Furthermore, despite the agreements the studios had with BitTorrent.com, iiNet had no relationship with that or any other torrent site.

Cobden went on to say that while AFACT seemed only too happy to pressure iiNet to take action against alleged copyright infringers, it took no action against them directly, preferring the ISP to carry the costs of defending the studios’ copyrights instead.

He said that the studios had put forth ”exuberant rhetoric” in respect of the alleged infringements, but iiNet said it conducted itself in similar ways to its rivals Telstra and Optus – who it appears also took no action based on AFACT allegations.

Time and again AFACT has claimed that since iiNet took no action against its allegedly infringing subscribers, this was tantamount to condoning their illegal activities, but unfortunately for the anti-piracy group, this argument was quickly turned around on them by iiNet’s lawyer.

Since AFACT nor the studios took any legal action directly against alleged copyright infringers, they too must’ve condoned their copyright infringements.

The case continues.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

However, history has shown that BitTorrent users are an adaptive species that simply migrates to the next site when their home bases become uninhabitable.

While private trackers certainly have their place and will accommodate those lucky enough to get an invite, for this article we are interested in sites that are open to everyone, ranging from full Pirate Bay replacements to a do-it-yourself setup. If you’re looking for high speed downloads you could also consider to try Usenet instead (our Usenet guide).

Full Pirate Bay Alternatives

The only full Pirate Bay alternatives are sites that index torrent files, are open to everyone and also have a working tracker. Unfortunately, there are only a few sites out there that offer this full package -there are four of them below. We decided to include Demonoid here because it tracks many public torrents.

1. Torrentbox

2. 1337x

3. H33t

4. Demonoid (semi-private)

Torrent Indexers

Torrent indexers are sites that have a searchable directory of torrent files, but don’t host a (public) tracker of their own. Mininova has a tracker, but they only allow ‘featured’ torrents uploaded through their content distribution service. The most used torrent indexers are:

5. Mininova

6. isoHunt

7. Torrentreactor

8. BTjunkie

Torrent Meta-Seach Engines

BitTorrent meta-search engines are yet another brand of torrent sites. They don’t have a tracker and don’t host any torrent files on their servers. Instead they search for and link to torrents hosted on third party sites.

9. Torrentz

10. Nowtorrents

11. Qtorrents

12. Torrent-Finder

Private Trackers (open signup)

Most of the larger private trackers require an invite to join, but there are always a few that allow new members. Below are four of these (open) private trackers and more can be found on Btracs.

13. RTN

14. BiteMyTorrent

15. BitShock

16. TorrentIt

Standalone BitTorrent Trackers

Torrent indexers and meta-search engines can be used to find torrents, but none of them will be of much use without a stable BitTorrent tracker. Standalone BitTorrent trackers are much needed, they handle the communication between downloaders but don’t index any torrents themselves.

17. OpenBitTorrent

18. PublicBitTorrent

19. The Hidden Tracker

20. Denis.Stalker

DIY Pirate Bay Alternatives

The last category of Pirate Bay alternatives are the do-it-yourself projects. By using the three ingredients below The Pirate Bay can be easily rebuilt. It might take a few hours, but then the path to world domination is clear.

21. Pirate Bay Torrents Clone

22. Pirate Bay HTML Clone

23. Torrage: Torrent API

24. Tracker Software

Last but not Least

Google, the mother of all search engines has a filetype:torrent search command that allows you to find torrent files scattered across the Internet. Also, Google’s custom search allows everyone to create their own torrent search engine. Don’t tell the MPAA and RIAA.

25. Google

If you think we missed any good alternatives, please feel free to add your own in the comment section below, while clearly noting which category they fit into.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

But of course, being hacked isn’t the sole preserve of these organizations, it can happen to file-sharing sites too. In November 2008 a hacker tried to gain control of Torrentz.com and at the beginning of June NowTorrents had its own problems.

Today we bring news of another sizable hack, this time affecting Italy’s most prominent BitTorrent site, TNT Village. A hacker targeted the 50,000 member site and made off with the site’s database.

The admin of TNT Village explains: “A son of a bitch was able to discover my password. With it in recent days he has removed the TNT database. I then proceeded to change my password but in the meantime he/they had taken some sensitive data to users, and yesterday they were made public.”

Indeed, a torrent of the stolen data has appeared on various BitTorrent indexes. The data contained within is largely in Italian but a source with an interest in security breaches told TorrentFreak that the archive contains very sensitive information.

The site’s database schema, the actual database with around 50,000 usernames, passwords and emails, a list of site donors and private messages have all been leaked.

The site has taken steps to limit the damage but concerned users should change their passwords immediately, at the very least.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

This might have been in the back of the minds of the Be Broadband users who found out that a variety of torrent sites including The Pirate Bay, Mininova and Torrentz were no longer accessible. It didn’t take long before they started to complain to customer support on forums, IRC and Twitter.

“Why are BitTorrent websites being filtered by my ISP?! Going through a proxy proves they’re up,” customer Andrew Mason hinted to Be Broadband on Twitter, and he was not the only one. Similar reports came in on the Be Broadband forum and the topic of the IRC channel said “Connectivity issues to Mininova and TPB and potentially other remote hosts for some customers”.

So has Be Broadband decided that torrent sites are a no go for their customers? Luckily the support team on Twitter was quick to reassure its customers that the truth is not as evil as it seemed.

“We’re not blocking sites but trying to get to the bottom of the issue now,” the Be Broadband team later replied, with a follow up message later. “On the access to torrent site issue: only certain IPs are experiencing connectivity issues to these sites. Our network team is investigating.”

Be Broadband gave out some more details on their forum writing “There appears to be an issue affecting some of our IP ranges accessing some networks mainly in Sweden and the Netherlands regions. Whilst a lot of the torrent sites may be hosted in this region.”

Since most of the popular torrent sites are indeed hosted there, this does seem to explain why the problem appeared limited to torrent sites only. And since they have many more visitors than most other sites hosted on these networks, a conspiracy is easily born.

Thus far the issues haven’t been resolved.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In November 2008, someone used a forged CA driver’s license to take over Torrentz.com, and put some of his own ads on the site. Luckily, the hijack took less than a day to bring to an end and things were back to normal before most users even noticed that something was wrong. But Torrentz is not the only torrent site to interest hackers.

NowTorrents, a torrent meta-search engine that recently acquired a spot among the 10 most visited torrent sites on the Internet, is facing a similar problem. This morning, the admin of the site noticed that he was no longer in control of the domain name as it was transferred to a new registrar, GoDaddy.

Coincidentally, the admin also had two of his email accounts hacked, which could very well be the cause of the domain troubles. He told TorrentFreak that he is doing all he can to resolve the issues. Google has reinstated one of his email accounts after some emails back and forth.

GoDaddy, where the domain was transferred after it was hijacked, is currently looking into the case. It can usually take up to a week before the domain gets transferred back to the rightful owner, the admin said. However, by putting in some calls to a supervisor at GoDaddy he hoped to speed up this process a little.

How the ‘hacker’ gained access to the domains remains a mystery for now. The email password was secure and not really guessable, and all signs currently point to a keylogger. It wouldn’t be the first time that this has happened to an admin of a torrent site.

Nevertheless, the admin of NowTorrents is confident that he will soon regain access to his site. Meanwhile its users will have to be patient and look for alternatives until the site comes back.

Update: the site is coming back slowly, waiting for the DNS to propagate.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

“Total visits by Australians to BitTorrent websites including Mininova, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, TorrentReactor and Torrentz grew from 785,000 in April last year to 1,049,000 in April this year, Nielsen says. This is a year-on-year increase of 33.6 percent,” The Age wrote a few days ago.

This may sound like a lot of traffic, but since Nielsen reports the number of visits and not the unique visitors we expected it to be much higher. Luckily, Mininova was kind enough to give us some insight into their statistics so we could check how accurate Nielsen’s estimates are. The results are quite a shock.

When we look at the statistics of Mininova alone, we see that the site had 6,268,969 Aussie visits in April and a massive 33,162,846 Aussie page views. Compared to the same month in 2008 (4,144,556 visits), this is an increase of more than 50 percent.

So, the Australian visitors to Mininova alone are already 600% higher than Nielsen’s estimates of the total traffic to Mininova, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, TorrentReactor and Torrentz. Unfortunately we don’t have any details on the methodology or sample Nielsen used, but it’s certainly not very representative.

Perhaps even more worrying, The Age attributes the surge in traffic to the economic downturn, without providing any evidence for a causal relationship between the two events. Over the past 5 years most BitTorrent sites have seen huge traffic increases every year, also when the economy was in an upswing.

Even more so, the money generated by (legal and illegal) use of BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks is greater than the combined revenue of the various entertainment industry bodies who try to stop piracy. One could argue that without piracy the whole economy would collapse.

The downloading itself is not so much about cost saving. In Australia, BitTorrent is especially popular among those who want to catch up with US television shows that appear months or years later on TV down under. Money is not so much of an issue for them, they simply want to see the latest Lost or Heroes episodes.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

More recently, however, the pressure is being applied to the administrators of public BitTorrent sites and trackers who accommodate millions of users every day. At any given point in time 25 million peers are connected to The Pirate Bay’s trackers, which dwarfs every other tracker on planet earth while making the site the prime target of the entertainment industry.

If the Pirate Bay were to close, roughly 50% of all public torrents would be put to a halt, and many of the smaller public trackers would have a hard time in coping with the extra load and could even collapse under the strain. Meta-search engines like Torrentz would have much less to index too. That said, if you’re lucky enough to be a member of a private site, the show probably goes on.

What we’re interested in is how many of you rely almost exclusively on public trackers such as The Pirate Bay and what percentage get your BitTorrent fix mainly on private trackers. For clarity, we define a public site as one that requires no membership or logins and is open to all, while a private site is one you have to join and have probably been invited to. This leads us to the following question for this week’s poll.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Zabriskie, himself an avid BitTorrent user, said he has leaked all of his albums on torrent sites ahead of their official release date. And he’s not the only one doing this. “I can tell you from numerous conversations and firsthand experience that there are few artists left, even in the big leagues, that do not. You wonder where the early leaks come from? Don’t be so surprised.” he writes.

People are not going to buy any albums before they’ve had a chance to listen to them, or before they’ve seen the artist perform live, Zabriskie reasons. Indeed, the top 1% of all artists might still be able to sell an album based on their previous performances, but the average artist has to be heard first. Much to the dislike of the RIAA, file-sharing networks are the preferred way for many people to sample music.

Zabriskie doesn’t see file-sharing networks as a threat to musicians though, quite the opposite in fact. “No one should ever be upset that people are downloading their record for free. They’re listening to it. And chances are they will buy it someday if they like it. Someone who doesn’t buy it still wouldn’t have bought it if they didn’t download it, so what’s the worry?”

In fact, much like radio, file-sharing networks are a great way to promote music. Zabriskie discovered this himself, as one of his tracks appeared on the famous Indie/Rock Playlist torrent in February 2008. Many artists have seen an increase in their fanbase after one of their tracks appeared in these playlists, since they were downloaded by tens of thousands of people.

“It’s really cool, just one person’s mixtape, but a great way for people all around the world to see what’s going on in music that month. So, very suddenly, tens of thousands of people from around Portland to Poland had that song on their computer. How did Criznittle find it? I don’t know, exactly. But he did, and he liked it, and he shared it, and I found a lot of fans because of it’,” Chris points out.

So what does this mean for the music industry, one might ask. It is hard to predict the future of course, but it’s clear that consumer to consumer promotion will be much more important than the marketing budgets of the major record labels. Music is being freed from the corporate stranglehold, and although it’s a challenge to find the right distribution method for the future, the artists and fans will come out as the winners.

Zabriskie’s final words sum it up nicely.

“Bottom line: if you like something you listen to, support the artist however you can. If that means buying something, great. If that means going to a live show, great. If that means sharing it with a friend, great. If that means blogging about it, great. If that means requesting it on your local college radio station, great. If that means just scrobbling it to Last.fm so people can see that you’re enjoying it, great.”

“That’s the future of music. It’s completely in your hands, not mine, not anyone else’s who makes music. Yours. Don’t let anyone judge you for how you choose to find and experience music. The soundtrack to your life is up to you. All music is free, everywhere. Don’t take that for granted. Share it, disappear into it. It’s yours.”

Amen.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

With 734,300,000 page views in January, Mininova yet broke another traffic record, and the number of uploaded torrents has been growing steadily over the years too. Today, for the first time in its history, Mininova has over one million torrent files in its database.

On an average day, 3000 torrents are uploaded to Mininova, either anonymously, by members or premium publishers using Mininova’s content distribution system. Of course, torrents are also removed from the site too. All fake torrents or those linked occasionally to a virus have to go, but also some due to takedown requests from the copyright holder.

So how does Mininova compare to the competition, one might ask. Well the Pirate Bay has 765,000 torrents on their site, although they track twice as many files. IsoHunt currently indexes 1,734,435 torrents, and Torrentz searches through 4,070,699. The latter is a meta-search engine though, and doesn’t host any files of its own.

However, to weigh these sites against each other is really like comparing apples and oranges, since they all have different policies regarding older content. On some sites you’ll find thousands of torrents without any seeds or peers, while the other removes dead files quickly. The overall trend, however, is that more content is added than removed on all BitTorrent sites, and because of this they keep on growing.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete and Alexa, backed up by visitor reports from some of the site admins. If you’re looking for high speed downloads, a free Usenet trial might be a good alternative.

1. The Pirate Bay

It has been a good year for The Pirate Bay. The number of visitors spiked, despite efforts in Denmark and Italy to block access the site. Last month, The site celebrated its 5th anniversary, just after it broke the 25 million peers mark. At any given point in time, more than 25 million peers actively trade files thought the Pirate Bay tracker.

2. Mininova

Mininova has seen a steady rise in visitors in 2008, and more than 3 billion torrents were downloaded from the site in the past 12 months. In addition to user uploaded content, the Mininova team has started to focus more on premium publishers with their content distribution platform.

3. IsoHunt

Despite being ensnared in legal proceedings with the MPAA and CRIA, isoHunt is continuing to grow. This year they partnered with the Creative Commons music distribution site Jamendo, and just like The Pirate Bay, isoHunt added SSL encryption to the site, making it impossible for your ISP or the authorities to monitor users’ activities.

4. Torrentz

Torrentz.com, one of the oldest torrent sites around, celebrated its 5th anniversary in July. The site added a “verified torrents” feature this year, and inspired many other meta-search engines to do the same. Last month a “hacker” caused some problems after it took over the torrentz domain, but luckily this issue was resolved in a few hours.

5. TorrentReactor

TorrentReactor redesigned and optimized the site throughout 2008, which resulted in a significant increase in visitors. In addition, the TorrentReactor launched TorrentPrivacy, a service that allows BitTorrent users to download torrents anonymously.

6. Demonoid

After being forced to go offline following threats from the CRIA, Demonoid returned this April after 6 months of downtime. Since then it is business as usual, and most of the members returned quickly.

7. BTjunkie

In December 2007 BTjunkie was forced to leave their ISP following a takedown notice from the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. This year there were no troubles, and the site continues to go strong.

8. SumoTorrent

In 2007, SumoTorrent quickly settled itself among the top torrent sites, and traffic continued to increase this year. The pop-ups and redirects are new though, and don’t make it one of the most convenient sites to browse.

9. BTmon

BitTorrentMonster, BTmon for short, debuted in 10th place last year, and managed to climb a spot. Other than that, there is not much news surrounding the site.

10. TorrentPortal

Not much news about TorrentPortal this year either, but for BitTorrent sites that is usually a good thing. Traffic seems to be stable, although the site is not growing as fast as the other BitTorrent sites in this list.

Honorable mention: TorrentSpy

In 2006 TorrentSpy was more popular than any other BitTorrent site, but this changed quickly in August 2007, when a federal judge ordered TorrentSpy to log all user data. The judge ruled that TorrentSpy had to monitor its users in order to create detailed logs of their activities, and hand these over to the MPAA.

In a response to this decision – and to ensure the privacy of their users – TorrentSpy decided that it was best to block access to all users from the US. This led to a huge decrease in traffic, but still, it managed to make out top 10 list last year. March 2008 TorrentSpy owner Justin decided to shut down completely, and in May his company was ordered to pay a $110 million fine, which it will appeal.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

In fact, earlier this year the MPAA had to release a statement saying ‘they made a mistake’ in the figures. Nevertheless, the $6 billion figure in question has been quoted a lot, with MPAA chairman Dan Glickman still using it in almost every public talk, to convince his listeners of the seriousness of the ‘piracy’ issue. According to the MPAA there is more bad weather ahead, as it is now worried that piracy might flourish in the current financial climate.

“If you look at the situation, the current economic crisis makes this problem much more serious than before,” Glickman said recently at a forum, adding, “If we don’t protect IPR (intellectual property rights), our economic losses will be far worse.” The MPAA will of course leave no excuse unused to justify its anti-piracy measures, nothing new there. Although there are no studies that show how illegal downloads actually affect sales at the box office, there has been a significant bump in the number of BitTorrent users recently.

One should always be cautious to interpret these two events as having a causal relationship. However, after several months of relatively slow growth, BitTorrent sites have seen a dramatic increase in visitor numbers this fall. Since September, the number of peers tracked by The Pirate Bay has nearly doubled from 14 million in early September, to 25 million now. Other BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, Torrentz and BTjunkie report an increase in downloads, searches and web traffic, ranging from 25 to 50 percent over the same time frame.

This increase, even if it is directly related to the economic downturn, is not necessarily linked with a drop in box office grosses or DVD sales. ‘The Dark Knight’, which is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent in 2008 sold millions of DVDs, and grossed a record breaking billion dollars in cinemas worldwide. That does not really sound like a ‘bad year’ to us.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Times are changing though. After the mobile phone revolution managed to get more than 250 million Indians connected, the government is now aiming to increase broadband Internet penetration in India. The current target is 20 million broadband subscribers by the end of 2010, and 50 million by 2012, a 1000% increase compared to approximately 5 million now.

The increase in the number of Indian BitTorrent users compared to previous years has not gone unnoticed. Mininova, for example, is reporting a 300% increase in traffic from India compared to last year, and for most BitTorrent sites India recently entered the top 10 of traffic sources. If the target of 20 million broadband subscribers is indeed reached, India will be the number one traffic source for most BitTorrent sites by the end of 2010.

Of course, BitTorrent indexers are not the only sites that are affected by the growing levels of Internet access in India, but they do tend to be traffic magnets. Data from the traffic comparison site Alexa shows that there are three BitTorrent sites among the 100 most visited websites in India. Mininova, Torrentz and The Pirate Bay are listed in 39th, 46th and 100th place respectively, and isoHunt is not far behind.

Two factors that have undoubtedly contributed to the popularity of BitTorrent, are the availability of unlimited data plans and an increase in connection speeds. In India, most ISPs initially offered metered plans, where 1 GB of data cost somewhere around $10. Today however, almost every ISP has an unlimited plan with a decent download speed for $50 (which is a lot in India), as well as lower rate plans with reasonable speed limits.

After China, India has the highest growth rate of all emerging economies in the world, and Internet access is quickly becoming affordable to a larger group of people. So, don’t be surprised when you see hundreds of Indian IPs in your peers list in a few years from now, if the Internet hasn’t collapsed by then.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Flippy, the admin of Torrentz told us that he noticed some worrying changes when he checked his website late last night. There were banners from Adbrite at the top and bottom of the site, banners that didn’t belong there. It turns out that “the hacker” we mentioned before, managed to change the nameservers of the torrentz.com domain. In the middle of the new page torrentz.eu was now loading in a frame, so the site was usable apart from the extra ads.

When Flippy added some Javascript to the torrentz.eu site to prevent it from loading inside the frame, the .com domain suddenly linked to some fresh warez forum and an image hosting site. The warez forum, warez2share.com, was apparently hosted on a shared hosting account, and it didn’t take long before the account was suspended because of the traffic overload.

The hacker didn’t stop there of course, and he soon changed the page to a single Adbrite banner. And as if that wasn’t enough, he decided to email Flippy, to tell him how good of a hacker he is. “So, I emailed him back, and informed him that I have a lawyer who will subpoena Adbrite first thing in the morning, to get the account’s details,” Flippy told us.

After some emails back and forth, the hacker suddenly changed his tone. After Flippy reminded him that forging a US driver’s license is a serious crime, he suddenly became surprisingly cooperative. Instead of bragging about his hacker skills, he was suddenly willing to change the nameservers back. At the time of publication, the domain details have indeed been reverted, and until the changes clear, torrentz.com is being redirected to the backup domain, torrentz.eu.

It is not over yet though, as Flippy told us that he will do everything he can to find out the identity of the ‘hacker’, so stay tuned.

Update: The hacker is from California and forged a CA drivers license, which he can be put in jail for. Flippy, however, decided not to go after him, since it would be very costly to do from Poland, and it’s not worth it for 4 hours downtime.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Flippy, the admin of Torrentz told TorrentFreak: “We’re not sure what happened really, but it appears that someone is trying to take over our domain, claiming his email account was hacked.” Flippy is confident that the issue will be taken care of soon, but a backup of the site is in place at torrentz.eu in case the impostor succeeds.

Earlier this year, Torrentz celebrated its 5th anniversary, which makes the site one of the longest standing in the BitTorrent sphere. Over the years, the site has evolved from a site hosting .torrent files, to one of the fastest meta-search engines, indexing millions of torrents.

It is expected that Torrentz wont suffer any downtime because of the takeover attempt, so most users wont notice anything out of the ordinary, except from the notification at the top of the website.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The site has a community of more than a million users and lists “verified” torrents on the frontpage.

Torrentz.com

Founded: July 24, 2003
Founder: Flippy
News: The latest Torrentz news

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.