The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete and Alexa, backed up by visitor reports from some of the site admins. If you’re looking for high speed downloads, a free Usenet trial might be a good alternative.

1. The Pirate Bay

It has been a good year for The Pirate Bay. The number of visitors spiked, despite efforts in Denmark and Italy to block access the site. Last month, The site celebrated its 5th anniversary, just after it broke the 25 million peers mark. At any given point in time, more than 25 million peers actively trade files thought the Pirate Bay tracker.

2. Mininova

Mininova has seen a steady rise in visitors in 2008, and more than 3 billion torrents were downloaded from the site in the past 12 months. In addition to user uploaded content, the Mininova team has started to focus more on premium publishers with their content distribution platform.

3. IsoHunt

Despite being ensnared in legal proceedings with the MPAA and CRIA, isoHunt is continuing to grow. This year they partnered with the Creative Commons music distribution site Jamendo, and just like The Pirate Bay, isoHunt added SSL encryption to the site, making it impossible for your ISP or the authorities to monitor users’ activities.

4. Torrentz

Torrentz.com, one of the oldest torrent sites around, celebrated its 5th anniversary in July. The site added a “verified torrents” feature this year, and inspired many other meta-search engines to do the same. Last month a “hacker” caused some problems after it took over the torrentz domain, but luckily this issue was resolved in a few hours.

5. TorrentReactor

TorrentReactor redesigned and optimized the site throughout 2008, which resulted in a significant increase in visitors. In addition, the TorrentReactor launched TorrentPrivacy, a service that allows BitTorrent users to download torrents anonymously.

6. Demonoid

After being forced to go offline following threats from the CRIA, Demonoid returned this April after 6 months of downtime. Since then it is business as usual, and most of the members returned quickly.

7. BTjunkie

In December 2007 BTjunkie was forced to leave their ISP following a takedown notice from the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. This year there were no troubles, and the site continues to go strong.

8. SumoTorrent

In 2007, SumoTorrent quickly settled itself among the top torrent sites, and traffic continued to increase this year. The pop-ups and redirects are new though, and don’t make it one of the most convenient sites to browse.

9. BTmon

BitTorrentMonster, BTmon for short, debuted in 10th place last year, and managed to climb a spot. Other than that, there is not much news surrounding the site.

10. TorrentPortal

Not much news about TorrentPortal this year either, but for BitTorrent sites that is usually a good thing. Traffic seems to be stable, although the site is not growing as fast as the other BitTorrent sites in this list.

Honorable mention: TorrentSpy

In 2006 TorrentSpy was more popular than any other BitTorrent site, but this changed quickly in August 2007, when a federal judge ordered TorrentSpy to log all user data. The judge ruled that TorrentSpy had to monitor its users in order to create detailed logs of their activities, and hand these over to the MPAA.

In a response to this decision – and to ensure the privacy of their users – TorrentSpy decided that it was best to block access to all users from the US. This led to a huge decrease in traffic, but still, it managed to make out top 10 list last year. March 2008 TorrentSpy owner Justin decided to shut down completely, and in May his company was ordered to pay a $110 million fine, which it will appeal.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

TorrentFreak asked Samo, the founder of Usniff, why he started the site. “My inspiration was YouTorrent.com, before it sailed to clean waters,” he told us. “It is simple to use, responsive and has loads of good results for almost any search query. At that time I didn’t know about other similar meta-search engines, so I decided i’d try to make one myself – mostly for fun.”

The list of sites that can be searched through Usniff is currently limited to four, but Samo told us he plans to add more torrent sites in the near future. “I have not yet made a complete wish-list, but btmon.com, bitenova.nl and torrentbox.com will definitely be added in September,” he said.

Usniff does indeed have a similar look and feel as the old YouTorrent design. YouTorrent, launched in January 2008, quickly becoming the most successful new torrent site. The site initially indexed all the popular torrent sites, but switched to purely ‘verified’ torrents this April, after receiving legal threats.

Samo anticipates legal threats, but that’s not going to hold him back. “I actually do expect legal problems,” Samo told us. He thinks, however, that his site is completely legal, as it does not link to copyrighted material. “Worst case scenario is that i’ll have to move it to a server in a less strict country.”

We’ve seen a lot of new BitTorrent meta-search engines this year. Sites like this are a great resource to search multiple BitTorrent sites at once. Never forget though, that meta-search engines like this depend heavily on public trackers and sites that host the .torrent files – BitTorrent’s backbone. There aren’t too many of those left.

Usniff search results

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The order of the list is not indicative of the difficulty it is to get in; rather, it’s a reflection of what is in hot demand. Without further introduction, here are the hottest Private BT sites of 2008 (that you likely can’t get into):

So, just how many of these badboys are open to new signups? As of right now – a meager three. Just starting out? Perhaps you should check out the btracs.com list for some lower-level private sites.

Or, you can use ‘Open Registrations Checker‘ software that is now in final release. If you’re at all familiar with ‘Tracker Checker‘ – ORC is the same concept. It periodically runs through a list of private trackers for “openings” and displays the results. When one becomes open to new signups, you’ll be notified and be able to join – assuming you act quickly.

Some of you may already be using ORC – this is where we’ve put a new spin on it. We’ve painstakingly taken their “trackers.tlist” database file and completely revamped and updated it with all the newest and hottest private BT sites. Not even the file they offer on their website even comes close to offering the same functionality. Additionally, we’ve removed the public trackers and any other non-working BT sites from the list.

Installing Open Registrations Checker (with the new trackers.tlist file).

1.Download ORC and install. (Requires .NET framework 2.0 or higher).

2.Download our trackers.zip file. You’ll need to unzip it into TWO locations (choose to ‘overwrite’ the old file in both cases):

— C:\Program Files\Torrents Open Registrations Checker\

— C:\Documents and Settings\ [Your Computer Name] \

3.Launch ORC from the Start Button – the private trackers will be updated. The program is self-explanatory – check off what you want it to check; click the magnifying glass icon in the corner.

4.Outwit your next door neighbour the plumber by getting into these sites first!

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

There are a few changes in the top 10 compared to the list of 2007’s top torrent sites. Mininova is still leading the bunch, but The Pirate Bay is now in second place, in front of isoHunt. Torrentportal and TorrentReactor traded places as well, the sites are now 7th and 9th respectively.

YouTorrent is the only newcomer, and it’s really impressive that the site made it into the top 25 only 2 months after its launch.

Top 25 torrent sites March 2008

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

However, this is about to change – or is it?

United Networks, a large ISP active in the Kuwait area, has recently notified its customers about the new torrent site filter. They write: “The Ministry of information has today sent us a letter announcing they will be blocking all Torrent sites. This is due to piracy laws of the State of Kuwait and to protect the intellectual property of the pirated content on these sites.”

BitTorrent site filters are not new, last year Turkey blocked The Pirate Bay, a week ago the Danish ISP Tele2 had to do the same. Protesting does help sometimes, a few months ago, Mininova (not included in the Kuwait list) was blocked by an ISP in Dubai, a country in the same region as Kuwait. Only a few days later, the ISP in question decided to unblock Mininova as many customers complained, and threatened to move to another service provider.

It is unlikely that the Kuwait government will respond in the same way, but perhaps this is not needed anyway. If you take a look at the list of 20 torrent sites that was released today, you’ll probably understand that the state of Kuwait is not really up to date on what’s going on in the BitTorrent community. They missed most of the bigger BitTorrent sites, and several sites they listed ceased to exist months ago.

The Kuwait 20….

www.demonoid.com (has been offline for a while)
www.extratorrent.com
www.fulldls.com
www.meganova.org (is no more, redirects to SeedPeer)
www.seedpeer.com
www.nfo.com.il (not loading)
www.piratic.org
www.worldnova.org
www.power-portal.to
www.smartorrent.com
www.thepiratebay.org
www.torrentazos.com
www.torrent-base.dl.am (redirects to Usenext)
www.torrentlounge.com
www.torrentplaza.be
www.tvtorrents.com
www.xphilez.com
www.zakatron.com
www.zonamule.com (parked domain)
www.zoozle.de

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Here is the list, as of December 29, public BitTorrent sites only.

1. Mininova

Without a doubt the most visited BitTorrent site. In November, Mininova reached a milestone by entering the list of the 50 most visited websites on the Internet.

Alexa rank: 46

2. IsoHunt

IsoHunt continued to grow this year. In September they were forced to close their trackers to US traffic because of the issues they have with the MPAA, but this had no effect on the visitor count.

Alexa rank: 143

3. The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay has been in the news quite a bit this year and remains not only the most used BitTorrent tracker, but also one of the most visited BitTorrent sites. At the moment they are fighting with IsoHunt for the second place in this list.

Alexa rank: 147

4. Torrentz

Torrentz is the only “torrent site” in the top 10 that doesn’t host .torrent files. Several improvements and new features have been introduced over the past year such as a comment system, private bookmarks and a cleaner layout.

Alexa rank: 160

5. BTjunkie

BTjunkie was one of the fastest risers last year and continued to grow throughout 2007. Last month they were, like many others, forced to leave their ISP (LeaseWeb), but the transition to a new host went smoothly and didn’t result in any downtime.

Alexa rank: 445

6. TorrentSpy

TorrentSpy was the most popular BitTorrent site of 2006, but dropped to sixth place due to legal issues with the MPAA. To ensure the privacy of their users, TorrentSpy decided that it was best to block access to all users from the US, causing their traffic to plunge.

Alexa rank: 461

7. TorrentPortal

Not much news about TorrentPortal this year, but that probably is a good thing. Like most other sites they have grown quite a bit in 2007.

Alexa rank: 481

8. GamesTorrents

It’s quite a surprise to see GamesTorrents in the list of 10 most popular BitTorrent sites of 2007. This Spanish BitTorrent site had a huge dip in traffic earlier this year but managed to secure 8th place.

Alexa rank: 583

9. TorrentReactor

TorrentReactor.net has been around for quite a while, four years to be exact, and is still growing.

Alexa rank: 604

10. BTmon

BTmon was one of the newcomers in 2006, and it is the youngest BitTorrent site in the top 10 this year.

Alexa rank: 673

Honorable Mention: Demonoid

For being one of the most visited BitTorrent sites until they pulled the plug in November.

Top 5 Newcomers

1. SumoTorrent

SumoTorrent launched this April and quickly became one of the more popular BitTorrent sites.

Alexa rank: 1021

2. SeedPeer

SeedPeer launched in September and is formerly known as Meganova.

Alexa rank: 2924

3. Zoozle

A BitTorrent meta-search engine, launched in January.

Alexa rank: 2987

4. Extratorrent

Launched a year ago, it got a serious traffic boost earlier this year.

Alexa rank: 5304

5. BitTorrent.am

BitTorrent.am is also indexed by Torrentz.com, and was launched early 2007.

Alexa rank: 6903

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.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

What Torrenty.org did is simply change the the IP address of their tracker (tracker.torrenty.org) to the open tracker’s IP address. They’re reasons for doing so remain unknown.

Apparently, in all their torrents they were still using the hostname “tracker.torrenty.org” in the HTTP header. That means that all torrents originating from the site could easily be tracked, something a torrent site hosting illegal torrents might not necessarily want happening. The author of the ‘Stories from an Opentracker‘ blog and admin of the open tracker in question writes:

The fun part is, a quick look at the torrenty.org website shows us that they in fact serve warez-torrents and take money for that. Now they provided us with a complete list of IP-addresses of their customers and an easy way to distinguish their customers from all other requests by checking the HTTP-header. If we would be some kind of copyright-prosecutor, which we are totally not, now would be the time to send some letters to customers of torrenty.org.

Whether the site was aiding in the illegal sharing of copyright files is besides the point. What’s really shocking is that a site can be so careless about protecting its users privacy and anonymity.

The open tracker guys e-mailed Torrenty.org, but their e-mail bounced. A day later traffic from Torrenty.org fell sharply. It looks like they’ve stopped using the open tracker. I’m not sure if the fact that Torrenty.org (Google Cache) is unavailable has anything to do with it, but all of this seems exceptionally peculiar.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

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.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

On Snarf-it.org we read:

A couple of days ago we received this email from Microsoft asking us to remove about 200 torrents from the site that were “offending” their ideas of copyright. This site is run by people who have day time jobs, we don’t make anywhere near the exorbitant amounts of money made by other BitTorrent site admins so we have to have normal day jobs to survive. This means we do not have the time it would take to go through 400,000 sql entries to find and remove the torrents that other companies would like us to remove.

So snarf-it indroduced a ‘delete it yourself” service. Users of the DIY system can select up to 20 infringing torrents per day. The DIY service fully discharges the site’s responsibilities in respect of US DMCA and similar legislation as stated in Snarf’s wiki.

Although most BitTorrent sites comply with DMCA notices, a wise step if you want to keep the MPAA and RIAA off you back. But Snarf’s DIY service is certainly one of the most advanced and time-saving ways to do so.

If we take a look at the deal between BitTorrent.com and the MPAA we learn that all you have to do is comply to DMCA takedown notices, in order to please the MPAA.

Sounds fair enough.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Cheggit went public nearly a day ago but the torrent site already has 20806 registered users, a great success for a site that’s just starting.

Cheggit implements some neat features like a wiki and a tag based search engine.

Cheggit out

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

At this very moment they’re even more popular than suprnova in the “old days“. And they continue to grow with over a million downloads per day.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

snarf-it.org is now back online with it’s 300k torrent database and clean easy to use interface, no popups or sell out ads there. That however is the last time you will see any information from ourselves promoting it as we now officially have nothing to do with snarf-it.org, snarf-it was sold to a new owner about 2 weeks ago, we wish them well with our old and their new site.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

A year after the closedown, Sloncek, the brain behind the legendary torrent site told what really happened:

..there was a door bell at 6:30 in the morning, saying it’s the police. Actually I was not expecting anything anymore, since SuprNova.org has been taken offline long before that. They showed me a court order to search my place and they did so. They took as far as I remember, two of my computers and lots of documents.

Today the site is for sale at sedo, the end of an era.

Bye Suprnova.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Update June 26, 2007
Demonoid Offline For a Few Days

Update January 3 2007

Demonoid is currently down for maintenance
Will be back soon

Just to let you know, demonoid.com is open for registration. Demonoid is one of the biggest private torrent sites on the web and the most widely used BitTorrent tracker, together with the piratebay.

Get in before it’s too late.

You will be rewarded!

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

* How to get BitTorrent working in Itunes

* I steal TV because I have to!

* Fenopy, the Ajax Torrent Search Engine

* Secret Cinema & Camera Obscura (private), for the cult and arthouse movie junks

* RIAA bandwidth leeching

* BitTorrent & TV at macworld

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

However, BREIN identified NLexperience’s domain-holder and visited him at his home address, a technique often used by BREIN to put pressure on their victims. NLexperience went offline, but the site operator said to its users that he was determined to come back. When BREIN heard about these plans, it immediately sued the domain-holder, who eventually felt he had to comply.

Around the same time BREIN visited the 20 year old operator of TorrentIt, formerly known as 123torrents. After the first time BREIN went after TorrentIt, the site owner tried to sell the site for $30.000. BREIN in the meanwhile was preparing to strike again.

‘The admin had been active from The Netherlands earlier, and seemed to be in the assumption we would lose track if he would move the site to a foreign country’, says BREIN CEO Tim Kuik. ‘This was a misconception. We knew he hadn’t sold the site because there was too much resistance from the community to that. We have monitored the traffic on this site and on this basis determined that the person concerned still managed this site.’

TorrentIt stopped serving torrents after the complaint was filed, until further notice.

It seems that BREIN’s threatening and intimidating talk still works, although Brein has no legal power.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

TorrentFreak asked Meganova owner Bogaa if these rumors are true. And indeed, Bogaa confirmed the story:

Yes, Targetpoint made an offer to buy Meganova. They offered $20.000, 30% of the ad revenues and an additional $1000 per month. We do however prefer to continue working with Targetpoint on a pay per click basis.

Meganova is not the only BitTorrent site that Targetpoint is interested in. They are currently working with sites like Isohunt, The Piratebay and Mininova. And according to a our source they even have a 37% share in The Piratebay .

It started a couple of months ago when Targetpoint contracted two major adult content BitTorrent sites Empornium and PureTna. Empornium has approximately 650,000 active users; they moved their servers from the US to The Netherlands after the acquisition by Targetpoint in August 2005.

So it seems that Targetpoint is willing to invest in sites that have trouble getting advertisers through other channels such as Google’s Adsense because these sites are (assumed to be) associated with copyright infringement.

Targetpoint was founded in 2004 and is an Israeli company, with servers located in the Netherlands. In these countries offering .torrent files is not considered to be act of copyright infringement.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

BREIN claims to have taken down 50% of all BitTorrent sites in the Netherlands.

Brein often threatens the site owners to admit they are infringing copyright and asks them to give BREIN all the information about their members or we will sue. These threatening and intimidating talk seems to work, although Brein has no legal power, they do have the money to sue.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Check out George and his Ipod

Bush: Beach Boys, Beatles, let’s see, Alan Jackson, Alan Jackson, Alejandro, Alison Krauss, the Angels, the Archies, Aretha Franklin, the Beatles, Dan McLean. Remember him?
Hume: Don McLean.
Bush: I mean, Don McLean.
Hume: Does “American Pie,” right?
Bush: Great song.
Hume: Yes, yes, great song.
Unidentified male: . . . which ones do you play?
Bush: All of these. I put it on shuffle. Dwight Yoakam. I’ve got the Shuffle, the, what is it called? The little.
Hume: Shuffle.
Bush: It looks like.
Hume: The Shuffle. That is the name of one of the models.
Bush: Yes, the Shuffle.
Hume: Called the Shuffle.
Bush: Lightweight, and crank it on, and you shuffle the Shuffle.
Hume: So you — it plays . . .
Bush: Put it in my pocket, got the ear things on.
Hume: So it plays them in a random order.
Bush: Yes.
Hume: So you don’t know what you’re going to going to get.
Bush: No.
Hume: But you know –
Bush: And if you don’t like it, you have got your little advance button. It’s pretty high-tech stuff.
Hume: . . . be good to have one of those at home, wouldn’t it?
Bush: Oh?
Hume: Yes, hit the button and whatever it is that’s in your head — gone.
Bush: . . . it’s a bad day, just say, get out of here.
Hume: Well, that probably is pretty . . .
Bush: That works, too. ( Laughter )
Hume: Yes, right.

But now about the torrents. The guys from Bushtorrent.com give you an impression what Bush his torrentsite would look like:

Have you ever thought what it would be like if the President of your country was using BitTorrent technology as we always do? What sites would he visit, what torrents would he download, what nickname would he use in forums?

The President isn’t afraid of MPAA, the torrents will be always seeded for him and passwords will be always known. All private trackers will be opened for the President with the highest downloading speed. Isn’t he the lucky one?

We tried to imagine what George Bush would do in such a situation and what in the world goes on in that mind of his. We are pleased to announce to you the new torrent site opened by George Bush President of United BitTorrents: http://www.bushtorrent.com

Bushtorrent

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.