So, let’s see how well Google does, and how their traffic estimation and ranking compares to actual traffic data and Alexa’s ranking respectively.

One of the interesting features of Google’s site comparison is that it gives an estimation of the daily traffic when you’re logged in on a Google account. The data used for the traffic statistics comes from Google analytics, consumer panels, and other third-party market research.

The traffic data seem to be quite accurate, for some sites at least. The daily (absolute) unique visitors for Mininova, for example, is estimated to be slightly above 2 million a day, which matches with real traffic stats we got from the Mininova team.

As we look at the graph below we can clearly see that Mininova is in the lead judging by the number of visitors, followed by The Pirate Bay. isoHunt and Torrentz compete for the third place. After these four sites there is a huge gap to other BitTorrent sites such as BTjunkie, TorrentReactor and TorrentPortal.

It is interesting to see how many similarities there are between Google’s ranking, and the daily reach according to Alexa.

The regional differences in popularity of the sites are also worth mentioning. The Pirate Bay, for example, is more popular than Mininova in the US, and especially in Sweden. Torrentz, on the other hand, does really well in India, while isoHunt has a relatively large fanbase in Japan.

Overall it seems that BitTorrent sites are still growing, especially The Pirate Bay, since they nearly doubled their traffic in a year. This is pretty much in line with the growth in the number of peers on The Pirate Bay trackers, which went from 5 to well over 10 million in the last 12 months.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Of all BitTorrent sites, Mininova is currently in the lead, ranked 52thnd according to Alexa’s new and improved statistics. The Piratebay comes second, before isoHunt, Torrentz.com and btjunkie. It is estimated that The Pirate Bay has close to 25 million unique visitors per month.

It is not only the web traffic that got a traffic boost, the number of people using the Pirate Bay tracker has quadrupled compared to the population in December 2006, and is now at 12 million. The number of torrents has grown from 600,000 to 1,200,000 in the same period.

Hollywood is doing all it can to force The Pirate Bay offline, but it seems that the site only grows more and more, perhaps because of the extra publicity generated by anti-piracy activities. We saw a similar pattern two years ago, when the Pirate Bay nearly doubled their traffic after the raid by the Swedish police.

The expansion of The Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent sites shows that BitTorrent’s popularity continues to grow, and there is no sign that this will stop anytime soon.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

To give an impression how big they are, Mininova has well over 3,000,000 visits and 16,500,000 pageviews a day, and this number is still growing. Last month they already broke the 3 billion .torrent download barrier and we will probably see the 4 billionth download pretty soon.

Niek, one of the founders of Mininova, told TorrentFreak that the increase in traffic is facilitated by the new hardware they recently installed. “The faster the site is, the more visitors we get,” he said “However, more visitors make the site slower again, so we have to keep optimizing the site and hardware all the time.”

There is also a downside to this positive news of course. Mininova’s continuing growth is, in part, due to the downtime at Demonoid and the issues TorrentSpy and Isohunt currently have with the MPAA.

Note: Alexa’s data gathering is not perfect. The exact figures may be not be completely accurate, but it is a great tool (especially the traffic rank) to compare sites within the same niche and to get a global impression of traffic shifts over time.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The Alexa 100 is a list of the domains that generate the most traffic on the Internet. The fact that Mininova managed the top 100 is even more impressive if you take into account that over 25 local Google domains are among these 100 domains. Other popular sites in the Alexa 100 are Yahoo!, YouTube, Myspace, Wikipedia and EBay.

A the moment Mininova has 2,000,000 daily visitors who generate nearly 20,000,000 pageviews. Mininova continues to grow and served over a billion .torrent downloads in less than six months.

Most other BitTorrent sites aren’t doing too bad either. The Pirate Bay, Torrentz and Demonoid are all listed among the top 500 most visited sites, and more sites will probably join them in the months to come. Even Isohunt and Torrentspy continued to grow last month, despite the negative publicity. Here’s a combined graph of the traffic rank of the five most popular BitTorrent sites at the moment.

Compared to last year, all these sites continued to grow and attracted more visitors. Will it ever stop?

Note: Alexa’s data gathering is quite dubious. The exact figures may be not be completely accurate, but it is a great tool (especially the traffic rank) to compare sites within the same niche and to get a global impression of traffic shifts over time.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

01.Australia
Favorite Site: Mininova

02. Romania
Favorite Site: Mininova

03. Greece
Favorite Site: Mininova

04. Netherlands
Favorite Site: Mininova

05. Canada
Favorite Site: Torrentspy

06. United Kingdom
Favorite Site: Torrentspy

07. Sweden
Favorite Site: The Pirate Bay

08. Slovakia
Favorite Site: Torrentz

09. Malaysia
Favorite Site: Mininova

10. France
Favorite Site: Mininova

–

12 Unites States
Favorite Site: Torrentspy

It is remarkable to see that there are some clear differences in the origin of the visitors among BitTorrent sites. Mininova is the most popular BitTorrent site in Australia, Torrentspy in Canada, and perhaps less surprising, The Pirate Bay rules Sweden.

The numbers below show how popular these sites are. 59 for Australia means that mininova ranks 59th in the list of most visited sites in Australia.

Mininova
59. Australia
78. Romania
78. Greece
81. France
92. Netherlands

Torrentspy
63. Canada
68. Australia
77. United Kingdom
77. Croatia
84. United Arab Emirates

The Pirate Bay
17. Sweden
34. Norway
61. Denmark
64. Finland
127. The Netherlands

Note: Alexa’s data gathering is quite dubious. The exact figures may be not be completely accurate, but it is a great tool (especially the traffic rank) to compare sites within the same niche and to get a global impression of traffic shifts over time.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

It is hard to tell if these sites will ever stop growing, and if they will ever make it into the top 100 without one of them going down, but we’ll see what the future brings. Isohunt, the site that bumped the other sites into the top 200, is currently moving their servers from The USA to Canada, and will probably be up and running soon.

Note: Alexa’s data gathering is quite dubious. The exact figures may be not be completely accurate, but it is a great tool (especially the traffic rank) to compare sites within the same niche and to get a global impression of traffic shifts over time.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

All three websites continued to grow in 2006, especially in the first half of the year. The graph below shows that they all entered the Alexa top 500 this spring, which means that they are among the 500 most visited websites on the Internet.

Over the past 6 months the traffic ranks began to stabilize. Here’s a graph of the traffic rank of October, November and December. As you can see, the traffic is quite stable in this period, apart from the returning spikes in the weekends.

Other BitTorrent sites that made it to the 1000 most popular sites on the Web in 2006 are:

329. Isohunt.com
454. Demonoid
642. Torrentz.com
962. Puretna.com (adult content)

The award for the most effective advertising campaign goes to BTjunkie. Overnight they jumped from a traffic rank of 20,000 to a spot among the 2,000 most visited sites, and they managed to keep the people in.

We reported before that BitTorrent sites are slowly taking over the Internet. And it is not only the larger search engines and trackers that continue to grow. I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of torrent sites in Alexa’s top 1000 doubles in 2007. Let’s see what the new year brings.

Note: Alexa’s data gathering is quite dubious. The exact figures may be not be completely accurate, but it is a great tool (especially the traffic rank) to compare sites within the same niche and to get a global impression of traffic shifts over time.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.