SUMOTorrent: The New BitTorrent Juggernaut?
Written by Ernesto on November 08, 2007In just a few months SUMOtorrent managed to grow from 0 to 350,000 visitors a day, which makes it one of the most widely used BitTorrent sites. Impressive statistics but how did they accomplish this, and what are their plans for the future? Let’s find out.
SUMOtorrent is currently ranked 1,052 on Alexa, which means that they are close to entering the list of 1000 most visited websites on the Internet. In addition, SUMOtorrent is running a much needed - as well as one of the biggest, BitTorrent trackers.
This is pretty exceptional if you take into account that the site only had a dozen visitors 6 months ago when it just started.
We are glad that the administrator of SUMOtorrent agreed to answer some of our questions, so we can learn a bit more about his success story.
TorrentFreak: How many visitors does SUMOTorrent have at the moment?
SUMO: SUMOTorrent is now getting about 350 000 daily unique visitors, while SUMOTracker is now tracking 2 million peers, and is probably the largest public BitTorrent tracker hosted on a single server! We recently launched a second public tracker that we hope will be used as much by BitTorrent users as the main tracker.
TorrentFreak: What did you do to grow this fast?
SUMO: I believe the reason why we grew so fast is experience, ideas and support of countless people!
TorrentFreak: So, with all the traffic you’re getting you must be driving a really expensive sports car now right?
SUMO: I don’t have a car but I advise you all to drive safely, put your safety belt on and respect speed limits.
Many webmasters do not communicate about money and torrents. Truth is that, just like any other popular site with high traffic, torrents sites make an income with 4 zeros, SUMOTorrent included. However, we’re not rich: at the end of the month, with all our expenses (hosting of 6 servers for SUMOTorrent/SUMOTracker), developers, partners, backup servers, services… we have actually just enough cash to purchase new servers next month. Our partners could tell you that we often ask them for a delay to pay them every month :p
We also support various sites and donate to them when we have some extra cash (Filesoup, IndianMP3 …)
TorrentFreak: Are you running the site on your own or do you have a team of moderators helping you out?
SUMO: We are running the site on our own and looking for moderators to help us removing the spam and fake torrents that get through our filters.
TorrentFreak: SUMOTorrent is one of the few BitTorrent sites that has their own tracker, do you think we need more public BitTorrent trackers?
SUMO: Of course we do need more public BitTorrent trackers! Many BitTorrent sites do not have their own tracker, and will tell you that it is to avoid legal troubles. I believe this is only an excuse. When you come to think about it, a public BitTorrent tracker generates a lot of traffic that cannot be monetized as it is not seen by anybody. SUMOTracker costs about $500 per month and we feel like this money is well spent as we are doing it for the community!
TorrentFreak: The Pirate Bay announced that they are working on a new BitTorrent protocol, what is your take on this?
SUMO: I have quite bad memories of the Suprnova/Exeem project, but I believe the SecureP2P project launched by PirateBay will be a great improvement to BitTorrent as it is based on experience of what is not working good in the current protocol and trying to improve it. They have received dozens of suggestions from users all around the world, and I wish the best to them in this enterprise.
We have contacted the head of this project and will provide them with any resources they might need to achieve it. SUMOTorrent will of course support the new protocol, promote it to our users and provide additional trackers on SUMOTracker for the new tracker protocol.
TorrentFreak: Can you tell us something about features you want to add to SUMOTorrent in the future?
SUMO: We will add more languages and buy new servers to scale site architecture with our growth. We will also work on content partnerships, and invite any filmmaker, music group or artist who is interested in sponsoring of his production and free distribution of his content through our site to contact us.
Just like PirateBay and Mininova, we would like to promote groups and help artists getting known through the power of peer-to-peer!
TorrentFreak: Do you have a message for all the anti-piracy organizations out there?
SUMO: Yes, take a look at the 100 first sites according to Alexa ranking! P2P and BitTorrent websites are here to stay, and they are the major means of online content distribution nowadays. This is a fact. Instead of trying to block the highway that leads to your customers, you should put your strategy into question. When the time will come that P2P sites will get better organized (and this time is soon, you know it) and ran by smart structures instead of simple individuals, you will understand you have missed the last opportunity you had to jump on the bandwagon of the digital revolution!
Meanwhile for all torrent users, we are happy to give you a free drive to where you want on www.sumotorrent.com :)
TorrentFreak: Thanks SUMO and good luck in the future!
Previously: Alleged MPAA Harrassment Causes aXXo / Pirate Bay Rift
Next: Prosecutor Announces Charges Against The Pirate Bay
76 Responses (Add yours or TrackBack)
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“lost” instead of list.
nice article.
what a horrible site…
Look at Alexa average pageviews: 2.0. I’d be curious to know what kind of traffic this is, is it authenticate or a forced pop-up or something? There are no other major bittorrent sites with such a low average of pageviews.
[quote comment="206406"]Look at Alexa average pageviews: 2.0. I’d be curious to know what kind of traffic this is, is it authenticate or a forced pop-up or something? There are no other major bittorrent sites with such a low average of pageviews.[/quote]
Interesting point, sites like TPB or mininova have more pageviews indeed. The stats of SUMOtorrent are similar to mybittorrent.com and fulldls.com. I doubt that they manipulate their traffic. but they probably have less regular users than some of the other BitTorrent sites.
Massive amounts of ads even with adblock/hosts file to prevent them.
Yes it is similar to mybitorrent.com and fulldls.com, which like sumotorrent piggy back a lot of their traffic from torrentz.com. I think that’s the reason for such a low pageview count, low regular users and incoming links from high traffic sites like torrentz.com.
The reason that sumotorrent got popular so quickly, is it’s part of a highly popular web ring.
All the sites within the web ring are quite poor with high levels of advertising. These sites are acting like circle jerks sending low quality traffic to each other. All sites have to be of similar quality so to not attract too much of the traffic to themself. This is the cause of the low average page views yet high pagerank of the webring sites.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=circlejerk
Adult sites do something similar.
Oh look, now torrentfreak is part of the webring on sumotorrent. =P
[quote comment="206391"]what a horrible site…[/quote]
[quote comment="206417"]Massive amounts of ads even with adblock/hosts file to prevent them.[/quote]
Couldn’t agree more.
i might check it out when there arnt so many adds :S
I wonder how much he pay you to promote his website.
It’s certainly one of the most dirty torrent index arround, full of ads, slow etc..
I hope the webmaster will get busted !
It’s showing this
“Table ‘table_torrents’ is marked as crashed and should be repaired”
Already down?
owned by digg lol
I didn’t like the site. It may be a good torrent search engine, but the fact of the matter is that I can’t see the name of 1/2 the torrents because of the poor design, and the ads are annoying as hell.
Sorry Sumo. You still have work to do.
I realize the site is of poor design, but it is a step in the right direction. We need more public trackers and more sites such as this (of better quality mind you) to help with the p2p revolution. I really hope that the individuals such as ourselves win the battle against the anti-piracy groups.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: “If it weren’t for the internet, I wouldn’t have bought half the music CDs I have today.”.
I don’t think it has enough ad crap on it
SUMOTorrents is a piece of crap.
World record for the most popups mights be the only good thing about it.
Their tracker is alright, but is very unreliable.
Overall, SUMO is something to avoid.
Demonoid, TPB and MiniNova 4 Me.
[quote comment="206541"]I realize the site is of poor design, but it is a step in the right direction. We need more public trackers and more sites such as this (of better quality mind you) to help with the p2p revolution. I really hope that the individuals such as ourselves win the battle against the anti-piracy groups.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: “If it weren’t for the internet, I wouldn’t have bought half the music CDs I have today.”.[/quote]
Damn straight, but can it get any more adds?
[quote comment="206550"]SUMOTorrents is a piece of crap.
World record for the most popups mights be the only good thing about it.
Their tracker is alright, but is very unreliable.
Overall, SUMO is something to avoid.
Demonoid, TPB and MiniNova 4 Me.[/quote]
ditto on that
Dont see any popups but yeah they have popunders which are really annorying.
Thankfully I can and have removed them with AdMuncher:
http://war59312.admuncher.com/download.shtml
It’s an ad blocker that works in every browser.
No ads either, besides one little flash one which I just removed by adding a custom entry.
Funny I just blocked all the ads with Adblock Plus… but ya I’ll never go to this site again…?
Guys, as you read from the interview the site was started about 6months ago. And Sumotorrent is using a self developed frontend on the site. It’ll take some time before all the flaws in the site has been removed, it can’t be done on a single day.
i dont know about you, but i like sexy women around every corner of the page. makes me feel better about getting my torrents!
it’s not about the flaws, it’s about the crap advertisement all over the website.
I respect everyone’s opinion but think about the admin of sumotorrent who works hard to give to the BT community. If I was him you all would have definitely hurt my feelings is all I’m saying, maybe tone down the insults and instead give him some constructive critisim?
The tracker is not the website, an alexia ranking of the site is not the ranking of the traffic of the server that runs the tracker(s).
The stats the people giving above of TPB and Minenova are not the same as the trackers TPB and Minenova use. most uploaders use the tracker from sumotorrent as secondairy tracker. The same with the many other torrentsites that run on their tracker. Its not said that all torrents run through the website / portal of SUMOtorrent.
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