TorrentFreak

After a lost legal battle, Mininova was forced to take drastic measures a year ago. The site’s founders removed millions of torrents to avoid having to pay millions of dollars in fines. In addition, new uploads were restricted to approved publishers only, a choice that expectedly dwarfed the site’s traffic and user base in the year that followed.

BitTorrent engine BitSnoop has the honor of being the fastest growing torrent site in 2010. After a terrible disaster in February the site lost its entire database and had to go offline for a couple of months. Skip a few months forward and BitSnoop is back on top as one of the leading indexers, with over 10 million indexed torrents covering a massive 12,049,125 GB of data.

When BitTorrent trackers get emails from content producers it’s usually an indication that relationships are about to break down in a big way. But when lifestyle and clothing company Voleurz saw their videos being made available on the ExtremeBits BitTorrent tracker they didn’t send the usual cease and desist. Instead, they asked the site to spread more of their videos while using their torrent stats in sponsorship proposals.

BitTorrent search engine isoHunt has reversed the change it made earlier this year, where all US visitors were redirected to a ‘lite’ version of the site to prevent it from being shut down. With this move, isoHunt founder Gary Fung hopes to regain some of the visitors he lost due to the change. Meanwhile, isoHunt is awaiting the appeal of the permanent injunction the District Court of California issued in their case against the MPAA.

A massive attack on the hosting provider Reality Check Network took down several major BitTorrent sites today. The attack corrupted many servers on the network and at the time of writing TorrentReactor, Vertor and several other torrent sites remain inaccessible. Due to the prolonged downtime, millions of users are having to seek refuge at other torrent sites.

Nicely timed at the start of the new college year, a new BitTorrent site dedicated to sharing knowledge in the form of textbooks has surfaced. Torrent My Book – a project run by two college students – aims to become the world’s largest BitTorrent index of textbooks, following in the footsteps of the late TextBookTorrents.

In a few months TorrentFreak turns five, and leading up to that milestone we will occasionally look back at how the BitTorrent landscape has changed over the years. Although there is no doubt that BitTorrent has more than quintupled its user base since 2005, there have been only a handful of sites serving a large slice of the masses.