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
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@ernesto,
How much did you get payed to write this article? Everybody knows that you are corrupt. Anyway the high traffic is due to the fact that torrentspy sends them their US visitors, check the ads on sumocrap
Total crap, I’ve seen some ad drenched sites before but this is pathetic. You to sift through the ads just to find the torrents. I’ll pass thank you very much.
Total crap, I’ve seen some ad drenched sites before but this is pathetic. You to sift through the ads just to find the torrents. I’ll pass thank you very much.
well totally agree with you on that one …hate sites like that….
http://galacticcentral.org
Jesus…what a bunch of whiners…..If you don’t want popups or popunders…try turning scripting off in your browser….Instantly stops that problem….And your getting stuff for free…..so quit yer bitchin already.
[quote comment="206779"]@ernesto,
How much did you get payed to write this article? Everybody knows that you are corrupt. Anyway the high traffic is due to the fact that torrentspy sends them their US visitors, check the ads on sumocrap[/quote]
Ernesto does not get paid to promote websites. If he finds something he thinks is at least worth writing about in regards to BitTorrent in hopes it will hit the frontpage of digg. That’s where he gets payed, if you still think that makes him corrupt so be it but he’s a good guy.
Why would you promote this site? Its a piece of sh*t. So many popups, ads… I tryed to download one torrent and what do you know, its a fake. First one downloaded and its fake. Pathetic
I say let’s bury this story on digg!
Hello guys,
First I would like to thank Ernersto for his interview. He is I think the only journalist close enough to all bittorrent webmasters to write always interesting articles.
Then, I have read carefully all your comments and you are right. We need to improve the quality of the torrents on the site (though we are already using PirateBay fake list and other solutions to detect the fake torrents), that is why we are looking for a team of moderator.
We will also improve the lisibility of the site, we have some issues with torrents with very long names.
We have also several ads. Probably too much according to some of you. We try our best every month to negotiate with our ads partners feature less intrusive ads. We will remove some of them as soon as we have enough to support the growth of the site and have enough servers.
Finally, even though some of you do not like the site, we are really proud of where we have gone in 6 months, and offering one of the largest tracker (which has a 100% uptime) is a great achievement.
SUMOTracker is now hosting 200 000 torrents, almost 1/5th of all alive torrents! We want to continue providing the service.
Thank you all for your suggestions, and let us know if you want to help us and become moderator at SUMO!
SUMO
http://www.sumotorrent.com
Here’s a suggestion, take that piece of shit you call a website offline and die.
Pfui! Please take your site offline.
plz sumo torrents is a heap of shite,. its unusable and slow
@Sumo
“He is I think the only journalist”
Journalist? Are you sure? The last time I checked, keeping a blog did not make anyone a “Journalist”.
Anyway I hate your site so bad that I wish someone had the guts to DDOS it, you don’t deserve it to run a torrentsite, your an embarrassment to the scene.
How many of you guys remember SQRTboy from filesoup, this is that same guy, you remember him as the guy that messed with other people’s servers. The same guy that bites the hand that feeds him, the same guy that sold crappy software to people who were clueless and finally the same guy that will sell you all out to the highest bidder.
I never trusted this guy, no one ever does. If you was on the old filesoup forums then you know what I am talking about.
sumotorrent, another unsafe unfiltered tracker for mediasentry to attach their industrial volume tracking peers
sumotorrent, ensuring 200,000 torrents, almost 1/5th of all alive torrents, are unsafe and tracked by anti-p2p groups
sumotorrent, designed and built to rape the filesharing scene of advertising revenue without a single regard to the safety of filesharers
These hateful comments are really over the top, guys. Srsly.
Fuck u, fuck sumo and fuck torrentfreak
bloody annoying site!
Respect, you’ve gained it right here, sumo.
I did see one add… which is impressive because it’s the first one in month as far as I can remember.
But apart from that how is this site more shitty than all the other public tracker crap out there?
Sheesh what a bunch of crybabies, if you don’t like a site then simply don’t use it.
If you hate ads so much then get a decent browser that blocks them instead of whinging about it like the little girl that you are.
And then that h33t character who seems think he’s safe on closed sites, amazing that people can still be that ignorant after the media defender leak, not to mention the oink ordeal, what a joke…
what a crummy website design
sites like this are the reason i use adblock.
i only saw _1_ ad, wixi_banner.swf
people need to learn how to configure adblock, suck it up and see ads (zomg it’s an ad! quick kids, take your cyanide pills) or just /quit the internet.
What a disgraceful site. It’s full of shit adverts beyond reason. I’m going to shop this cunt in, just for a laff.
omg it has email newsletter / alerts and everything!
it has to be a list farming scam.
What a nightmare of a site..
We are whining because Sumotorrent is a piece of crap and Ernesto is bigging it up like the second coming of jesus.
Protip: When you accept payment/hits for blog posts you lose credibility.
Long live mininova/demonoid/piratebay and other good guys.
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