Btswarm.org

Btswarm.org is a fast and clean BitTorrent site that is available in 5 different languages. The site currently indexes 107,907 torrents, which represents over 80TB of data. Btswarm supports search based RSS feeds, a great feature that every site should have in my opinion.

SumoTorrent.com

SumoTorrent who recently partnered with FileSoup, one of the oldest BitTorrent communities, collects the BitTorrent stats for our monthly stats post. But, they also serve torrents and offer not only .torrent links but also Azureus magnet links, and DHT links.

One of the things about SumoTorrent that I particularly like is that they have their own tracker, something more BitTorrent sites should do. At the moment 50% of all the torrents on public trackers are tracked by The Pirate Bay All hell would break loose if they were taken down.

FlixFlux.co.uk

FlixFlux is a BitTorrent site that focuses on movie releases. On the frontpage they list the US box office charts, DVD rental charts, and the UK box office charts. If you register you can also keep track of your favorite movies on the site. FlixFlux has a description for every film including the IMDB rating and plans to add movie trailers and for their torrents soon, which is an interesting feature.

A similar site also dedicated to movies torrents is Superfundo, they focus mainly on Scene and aXXo movie releases.

TorrentTAB.com

TorrentTAB is a new BitTorrent meta-search engine that displays the search results in a tabbed view. Personally I’m not a big fan of meta-search engines, but I know others like it. The tabbed searching works quite well. TorrentTAB site currently searches Isohunt, Mininova, Torrentz, BTjunkie, Meganova, and Torrentspy.

JunkNova.com

JunkNova is a torrent review site that keeps you up to date on all the stuff that’s available on BitTorrent, similar to sites like rlslog and hypoh. JunkNova is brought to you by the makers of TorrentScoop, a Google-powered BitTorent search engine.

MicroTor.org

The last site in our list is Microtor, a site that only indexes TV torrents. MicroTor allows you to browse through the available shows and seasons and they also have a brief plot outline for every TV show.

Do you know any new BitTorrent sites that are worth a visit? Feel free to leave a comment!

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

What is Hot?

TV-series are by far the most shared files on BitTorrent. Nearly 50% of all the people who use BitTorrent at any given point in time do this to download a TV-show, even though the number of available torrents are much lower than for Music or Video. The second most popular torrent category based on the number of downloaders and uploaders is Video (15.7%), followed by Games (8.6%), Music (7.8) and of course XXX (6.0%).

As we will see later on, these figures are quite different from the number of .torrents that are available.

The statistics are calculated based on the info from the trackers, this means that someone who’s downloading 2 music albums at the same time is counted twice. However, we don’t expect any significant differences between the categories, so the percentages should be pretty accurate.

What type of torrents are offered?

Music (25.9%) and Video (24.2%), followed by Applications (13.3%), are in the lead if we look at the number of available torrents. Games (7.8%), XXX (5.1%) and Anime (4.3%) are less popular.

Even though 50% of the people use BitTorrent to download TV-series, only 10% of the available .torrents on public trackers are TV related. This means that on average the swarms (seeds + peers) are greater for TV-torrents, not a big surprise because an average episode of a popular TV-show like Lost is downloaded by more than 500.000 people in a week.

Share Ratios?

Sharing is one of key features of BitTorrent etiquette. The more people that are sharing a file, the faster other people are able to download it.

If we take a look at the sharing ratios of the categories we see that Anime fans have an impressive share ratio of 2.5, and are sharing the most. Anime fans are followed by people who download Music (ratio 1.9) and Applications (ratio 1.5) respectively.

XXX downloaders are probably looking for a quick fix, and are more the “hit-and-run” type (ratio 0.38). The category Video has the lowest share ratio, a disappointing 0.27, let’s hope we see some improvement there next month when we publish more statistics and perhaps even some emerging trends.

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

Bitlord is now developing alongside Iphant which is also a BitTorrent / eDonkey client. The addition of eDonkey support makes it possible to use both networks to download a file which might speed up BitTorrent swarms that have only a few seeders. If the .torrent includes ed2k hash it is downloaded via BitTorrent and eDonkey, if not, it can be joined with the wizard you can find in the file context menu.

The fact that Bitlord is no longer based on BitComet 0.56 which by itself is a great improvement. The client is spyware free but it does contain adware. Currently is has a banner on the bottom of the application, and some advertisement for the Bitlord pro version, which is basically the UseNeXT client that is advertised on many BitTorrent sites.

Throughout its existence Bitlord has always been a controversial client. Like BitComet, Bitlord is banned from quite a few private trackers because it allegedly disobeys the BitTorrent etiquette, and bullies other clients. However, Bitlord is now moving in the right direction and according to the Bitlord developer it should absolutely be accepted by private trackers. We’ll see what the future brings.

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

Over the past years BREIN managed to shut down 131 sites that offered links to copyrighted content. Most of these sites were smaller BitTorrent sites, hosted on free hosting accounts or on a server box connected to a private DSL line.

You might wonder why BREIN is only picking on these smaller guys? Well, the answer is pretty simple, their intimidation tactics will not impress the larger torrent sites. Most of the larger BitTorrent sites and trackers have decent lawyers, and so far BREIN doesn’t have a strong case in court because BitTorrent sites are simply NOT illegal in The Netherlands.

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.

Svartholm talks about how The Pirate Bay, and other BitTorrent sites’ popularity is a clear indication of “civil disobedience against the current copyright legislation, on a huge scale.”

But the real highlight of the interview is his opinion on how publishers are afraid, due to lack of knowledge about BitTorrent and filesharing, of how their content is being stolen. He says, “Some publishers are afraid — out of ignorance — but even though they are wrong I can respect that. Some, however, like the MPAA can most accurately be described as rabid, obsessed lunatics.”

Rabid, obsessed lunatics? I’m not sure too many people would disagree. In the past few years, the MPAA have single-handedly done some of the most outrageous things to prevent their movies from being “stolen”. They’ve sued a company for pre-loading legally purchased movie DVDs onto iPods, Stalked Svartholm, bred anti-piracy, DVD-sniffing dogs and banned Americans from inviting more than a certain number of people over to watch movies on a larger-than-29″ screen Home Theatre system. Oh wait, that last one didn’t happen. What’s really sad is that if they did actually do something like that, it wouldn’t surprise anyone!

Creative Commons photograph by David Wise.

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

Initially the number of Hong Kong people using BitTorrent dropped over 80% after Chan was arrested in April 2005. One of the main reasons to uphold the the original ruling was this deterrent effect of the sentence, according to the judge.

The strange thing about the ruling is that High Court judge Clare-Marie Beeson believed that Chan did not share the copyrighted material with others on purpose. Despite this strange statement, Chan’s lawyer announced that there will be no further appeal, and Chan will sit out his three months. At least it’s not as bad as the seven year the “screener pirate” has to spend in jail in the U.S.

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

John from Searching Unlimited LTD, one of the masterminds behind the project told TorrentFreak that he is happy that he was able to bring these brilliant people together and recruit some of the web’s most gifted engineers.

Although the sites are sold to Searching Unlimited LTD, the site owners stay in charge of daily operation.

John Gotts explained:

All BitTorrent admins who sell their site will own a part of Searching Unlimited LTD, the parent company. However, they all will continue to own and operate the site they sell us. Additionally they will get pay and advertising revenue share of both their old company and any new projects they help create or support.

Gotts added that the great thing about this initiative is the brain trust that they are creating at Searching. “It’s a family of companies, and the huge amount of traffic we generate, together with the genius people who are involved, make it a very powerful family”.

BitTorrent sites make up for a significant portion of the total Web traffic. Teaming up all these high traffic BitTorrent sites (combined with their other projects) will instantly make them a big and powerful player on the online advertising market.

Stay tuned!

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