The most notable absentee this year is TorrentReactor, one of the oldest torrent sites on the Internet. The Russian-based site hasbeen featured in the top 10 since 2006, but missed the cut in 2012. Last year’s best newcomer LimeTorrents took an even bigger hit in traffic and has dropped off the list as well.

Below we have compiled a list of the 10 most-visited torrent sites at the start of the new year. Only public and English language sites are included. The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete and Alexa. In addition, we include last year’s ranking for each of the 10 sites.

1. The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay is probably the best known BitTorrent brand on the Internet. The site was founded in 2003 and is still expanding, despite the various legal troubles and blockades that were designed to hurt the site in recent years. The Pirate Bay currently has close to 2 billion page views a month.

2. Torrentz

Torrentz has been the leading BitTorrent meta-search engine for years. Unlike the other sites featured in the list Torrentz does not host any torrent files, it merely redirects visitors to other places on the web.

3. KickassTorrents

Founded in 2009, KickassTorrents is one of the youngest sites in the list, and this year it moved up to the top 3. Responding to the increasing worries about domain seizures, the site moved from its kickasstorrents.com domain to kat.ph a few months ago. The site continues to innovate and release new features every other week.

4. IsoHunt

In 2010 isoHunt became the first search engine forced to implement a keyword filter provided by the MPAA. Despite this setback, isoHunt continues to be listed among the top torrent sites. In 2012, isoHunt hopes to get rid of the filter through the Appeals Court.

5. BTjunkie

BTjunkie had to deal with a setback a few months ago when the site was blocked in Italy following a court order. In response to the block, the site’s owners launched an ad-free proxy site for Italians only. Just as last year, BTjunkie settles in fifth place.

6. ExtraTorrent

ExtraTorrent is one of those robust torrent indexes that doesn’t make the news very often. Compared to last year the site has moved up a spot and is now the 6th most popular torrent venue.

7. Demonoid

The semi-private tracker continues to attract a massive audience, also on the new .me domain name. Behind the scenes the site’s owners are working on a new and improved look.

8. EZTV

Unlike the other sites in the top 10, TV-torrent distribution group EZTV is a niche site specializing in TV content only. Despite its fair share of downtime this year, EZTV has managed to get a spot in the top 10 for the first time in its six year existence.

9. Bitsnoop

BitSnoop is another newcomer that gained a large audience this year. This didn’t go unnoticed by the RIAA, who filed a complaint at the U.S. District Court of Columbia and obtained a subpoena to reveal the identity of BitSnoop’s owner a few months ago.

10. 1337x

1337x is also new to the top 10, and focuses more on the community aspect than some competitors. The site’s owners say they started 1337x to “fill an apparent void where it seemed there was a lack of quality conscience ad free torrent sites with public trackers.” Its 10th place this year proves that they’re getting the success formula right.

Disclaimer: Yes, we know that Alexa isn’t perfect and that Compete has plenty of flaws, but combined both do a pretty good job at comparing sites that operate in a similar niche.

Source: Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2012

4shared, the largest English language file-sharing site, is serving 2.5 billion pageviews alone every month, and this number is increasing rapidly.

Below we have compiled a list of the top 10 largest (general purpose) file-sharing sites on the Internet, based on measurements by Google. What stands out immediately is that 8 of the 10 sites are related to cyberlockers, and only 2 are BitTorrent sites.

This picture is quite different from the landscape 5 years ago when BitTorrent sites dominated the file-sharing space. Early 2007 Mininova was the first BitTorrent site to earn a place among the top 100 most-visited sites on the Internet, and soon thereafter they were joined by The Pirate Bay.

In the years that followed BitTorrent sites continued to dominate, but in the background cyberlockers were catching up, and catching up fast. Where most BitTorrent sites were seeing moderate growth, several new cyberlockers saw their traffic surge. In the last year many cyberlocker sites have outgrown The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, isoHunt and other popular torrent sites.

Below is the full list of sites based on Google’s ranking. We have to note though that several site owners in this list told TorrentFreak that the monthly pageviews and unique visitors are hugely underestimated. The Pirate Bay for example claims 1,500,000,000 pageviews, which is more than double the Google estimate. Other sites report similar ‘downgrades,’ so overall the ranking would still hold.

Source: Top 10 Largest File-Sharing Sites

Below we have compiled a list of the 10 most-visited torrent sites at the start of the new year. Only public and English language sites are included. The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete and Alexa. In addition, we include last year’s ranking for each of the 10 sites.

To download torrents anonymously we highly recommend BTGuard

Do you know a good public torrent site that’s not listed here? Feel free to plug it in a comment.

Update: 2012′s best torrent sites.

1. The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay is probably the best known BitTorrent brand on the Internet. The site was founded in 2003 and is still expanding, despite the immense legal witch hunt launched by the entertainment industries several years ago.

2. Torrentz

Torrentz has been the leading BitTorrent meta-search engine for years. A few weeks ago the site traded in its .COM domain and switched to .EU, but this didn’t affect the site’s traffic.

3. IsoHunt

Last year was a tough one for isoHunt, as it became the first search engine that had to implement a keyword filter provided by the MPAA. Despite this setback, isoHunt is still the third largest torrent site in terms of traffic. In 2011, isoHunt hopes to get rid of the filter through the Appeals Court.

4. KickassTorrents

KickassTorrents was the fastest growing newcomer of last year, and managed to continue this upward trend throughout 2010. The site released many new features and continues to innovate, still without a single banner ad on the site.

5. BTjunkie

BTjunkie had a pretty quiet year, which is usually good news for a site that operates in the BitTorrent niche. The only setback was the removal of the site’s front page from Google due to a DMCA complaint. As last year, BTjunkie settles in fifth place.

6. Demonoid.me

The impossible happened. Demonoid finished 2010 with only a minimal amount of downtime, compared to weeks or months in previous years. A few weeks ago the site announced that it would move from the familiar .COM to a .ME domain in response to the news about US domain seizures.

7. ExtraTorrent.com

ExtraTorrent is one of those robust torrent indexes that don’t make the news very often. In 2010 it continued to expand and the site gained two spots compared to last year.

8. TorrentDownloads.net

TorrentDownloads is in the same league as ExtraTorrent, a no nonsense torrent index that provides torrents to millions of users each month.

9. TorrentReactor

TorrentReactor fooled most of the tech press last year when it announced that it had bought a Russian town, one of the better PR stunts seen in 2010. On the flipside TorrentReactor seems to have lost some traffic due to a Google penalty, dropping the site to 9th place this year.

10. LimeTorrents.com

LimeTorrents is the best newcomer of 2010 in terms of traffic, which promises a lot for the new year. The site went live half a year ago and already made it into the top 10 in this short period. It’s also a bit ironic as ‘Limewire’ got shutdown a few months ago.

Honorable Mention EZTV

If there’s one site that deserves an honorable mention it’s EZTV. The leading TV-torrent release group almost made it into the top 10 on its own, but due the seasonal traffic spikes it just fell short. It has to be noted though that unlike other sites in the above list EZTV’s traffic doesn’t rely heavily on search engines such as Google or BitTorrent meta-search engines. EZTV currently has 30 million visitors a month and continues to expand.

Disclaimer: Yes, we know that Alexa isn’t perfect and that Compete has plenty of flaws, but combined both do a pretty good job at comparing sites that operate in a similar niche.

Source: Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2011

Google’s YouTube shows even more similarities to torrent sites as it allows users to submit content, with the only difference being that YouTube actually hosts the uploaded files whereas torrent sites only link to content indirectly through .torrent files.

In the last year, three of the largest torrent sites – The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt – were all taken to court by copyright holders for assisting in copyright infringement, and all three sites lost their cases to some degree. Strangely enough Google has never said a word about these cases other than to distance themselves from The Pirate Bay team after they were sentenced.

Despite this attempt at demarcation, three Google employees are now in a very similar position as the aforementioned torrent site operators. An Italian court just handed out suspended jail sentences to three Google employees for ‘allowing’ users to upload a video that invaded the privacy of a third person.

The three employees were not aware of the upload before they were notified by the police, but they made it possible, much like they make it possible to upload copyrighted content. The similarities with torrent search engines are striking.

It is needless to say that Google is not amused by the court ruling. While the company kept its mouth shut in response to the legal actions surrounding the torrent search engines, they now speak of an attack on “the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built.”

“Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming,” Google’s Matt Sucherman wrote in a blog post yesterday.

This response from Google does indeed seem logical, and we can easily apply the same reasoning to sites that index and host .torrent files. The operators of torrent sites and video sites can’t possibly verify and screen the content of all uploaded files. This is something the site’s users should be held accountable for.

This doesn’t mean of course that the site’s operators should ignore the law. The Pirate Bay for example has always been very responsive to requests from the police concerning illegal material linked to by the site. IsoHunt goes even further as it actively works together with copyright holders and Mininova even allowed copyright holders to prevent infringing torrents from being re-uploaded in the future.

According to Google such policies should be good enough to operate a site like YouTube without running into legal trouble.

“European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy,” Sucherman writes.

So here we have Google in a similar position as most torrent sites are in. Although the Italian verdict is outrageous the obvious upside is that unlike the torrent sites, Google has the financial power to successfully fight the verdict. According to former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde, Google got what it deserved.

“It’s good that someone takes on Google for a change. Let them take the heat for once – and let them make sure that other sites that they’ve previously had no problem filtering, that basically do the same as them, don’t end up in this shit the next time,” Sunde told TorrentFreak.

“I think it’s good that time has finally caught up Google. Maybe now we have a level playing field here. They have to take the fight as well. Previously they only said nice things about how important the Internet was, and then ignored all of the things going on. Even supporting them – China for instance,” he added.

“A big player like Google has the financial muscles to fight this thing. And we all know that Italy is just full of rules made by Berlusconi, for Berlusconi,” Sunde said, adding, “That fascist needs to go.”

Google has indeed committed itself, and said it “will vigorously appeal this decision.” The whole case revolves around the question of whether or not the operators of media portals and search engines should be held accountable for the actions of their users.

In recent months Italian courts have clearly answered positively to this question. They have opened the door for a nationwide block of file-sharing sites and with yesterday’s decision file and video hosting sites are not safe any longer either. So the next question is, can Google secure a safe haven for torrent sites?

Source: Can Google Secure a Safe Haven for BitTorrent Sites?

Understandably, Mininova’s traffic took a huge hit in the last week which is likely to continue in the months to come. For most other torrent sites, however, 2009 has been a successful year with growing visitor numbers all around.

We have compiled below a list of the 25 most-visited torrent sites as of today. Only public and English language sites are included. The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete, Alexa and SiteReport’s World Rank. The number of daily visitors and page views are estimates.

Update: The best torrent sites of 2011.

Source: Top 25 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2009

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.

Update: The best torrent sites of 2011.

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.

Source: Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2008

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

Source: Usniff, Torrent Search Made Easy

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!

Source: The Most-Coveted Private BT Sites of 2008

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

Source: BitTorrent Sites Show Explosive Growth

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

Source: Kuwait Government Blocks 20 BitTorrent Sites

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.

Source: Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2007

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: Mininova Enters List of 100 Most Popular Sites on the Internet

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.

Source: Torrent Site Carelessly Exposes User Information

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: The Pirate Bay, mininova, and Torrentspy Enter the Alexa 200

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.

Source: Snarf-It introduces “Delete It Yourself” Service

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

Source: Cheggit is Live

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.

Source: Mininova Hits 400 Million Downloads

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.

Source: Snarf-It is Back

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.

Source: Suprnova.org For Sale

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!

Source: Demonoid Open for Registration

* 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

Source: BitTorrent & P2P Linkdump (15)

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.

Source: More BitTorrent Sites Going Down

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.

Source: Targetpoint is buying BitTorrent sites

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.

Source: Brein takes down more Torrent Sites

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

Source: George Bush’ Ipod and Torrents

Almost all oscar winners are in the search cloud. Crash of course as the Best motion picture of the year, Brokeback mountain, King Kong, Syriana, Walk the line, Capote, The constant Gardener, Memoirs of Geisha, Hustle and flow, and The chronicles of Narnia.

Even Tsotsi (foreign language) and March of the Penguins (documentary) are in there

Actually, the only Oscar winners not in the list are the animated and short films. Wallace and Gromit (animated film), The moon and the Sun (animated short film), Six Shooter (live action short film) and A note of Triumph (short movie).

But people are not only looking for the movies, it seems that a lot of people are downloading the show as well because search terms like Academy, Academy awards, Oscar and Oscars are also among the most popular search terms.

Source: 2006 Oscar Winners popular on BitTorrent

Source: Piratebay suffers downtime

These 5 sites all grew in popularity over the past year. However, torrentreactor seems to be the loser and dropped from the 1st to the 5th place.

Click to enlarge

note: Alexa’s data gathering is quite dubious

Source: And the winner is: Torrentspy

Seedler was founded a while back but was actually brought to life almost three
months ago. The reason for it was to create simply the best site around due to
the fairly low quality of sites at the time of conception, though now it seems that
we’ve got some competition. We’re working hard to make Seelder the best and
we’re only getting positive feedback about it so far.

Q2. What makes seedler so unique?

Various things.

Its speed — it was built from the ground up with performance in mind so that it will
scale well and our perform any other site as demand rises.

Its automatic categorization — take a look at the TV category, its size, selection
and completeness is unparalleled (Though we’re still making tweaks, it will be fully
working shortly).

Its automatic spyware removal features, we fight spyware and crapware and
proactively remove thousands of torrents. Torrents removed cannot return.

Its ease of use and its clean and lightweight design.

Its lack of advertising whatsoever.

There are many under the hood features which I can’t elaborate on
because that would undermine their effectiveness. Though if you are a
regular visitor to the site you just might notice them if you have a
sharp eye. ;)

Also since most of the torrent site operators are so inquisitive and
just “snatch” our good features into their sites within days we prefer
to keep it quiet about the internals. ;)

Q3. How many torrents does seedler list at the moment?

At the moment we have a little over 150K, though we’re growing on a
daily basis at an average of 2000 per day.

Q4. How many visitors does seedler get, and how big do you want to grow?

It doesn’t get as many as we would have liked it to get. We obviously
want to be the biggest and best, as everyone else does.

Some of Seedler’s secret features would only become effective as it
grows more.

Q5. How is seedler funded, will it stay ad free? do you get any donations?

It’s a personal project of a group of friends, it’s already getting pretty
expensive for the “reward” we are getting in return. We’re not looking
to make money, we’re just looking for the appreciation on our good
work and the knowledge that we run and operate the best site out there
without compromises.

We don’t ask for donations at the moment. It may happen in the future.

Q6. Did you get any legal threats? How did you handle those?

Yes, we do get them from time to time. So far we’ve simply ignored them
for the reason that we believe information should be free and downloads
are not theft, This is simply the way of the 21st century, live with it
or don’t live with it.

Unbiased studies also show that the popularity of free downloads affect the
“industries” in positive ways, so then we feel even stronger regarding
our position.

The MPAA/RIAA/BSA are commercial organizations, their sole existence and
profits depend ONLY on how WELL they can SCARE the industries into
giving them funds and power to manage, run and execute campaigns to
scare people. Therefore making stock holder richer and richer with
every success.

Q7. Are you planning to fix the crappy translations :)

Yes! Unfortunately no one has offered help nor feedback about any of the
translations so far.

Q8. Do you have any future plans for the site?

We are making changes on a daily basis, our to-do list is huge and is
constantly growing rather than becoming smaller. We’re understaffed
and under-supported and are forced to do the work ourselves in our own
free time.

We have a bunch of great features that don’t exist on any sites, more on
that in due time at seedler.org

As for plans, we’ve got plenty, time will tell if we are able to execute
them.

Q9. Do you drink beer? Which brand?

Yes, we drink Seedler! our own home made beer. Just kidding.

Q10. Anything to add to this?

We always have a lot to say, so whenever you want to listen to some
rants just give us a buzz. But seriously, we feel that we are different
from most other sites;

1. We will never promoted or will promote spyware on our sites, in any
shape or form. There’s a new trend in the torrent scene and some of the
most popular sites seem to be ACTIVELY promoting spyware/adware, in
the shurt run this hurts hundreds of thousands of their visitors but in the
long run it would hurt them, too. Should we decide that we go into advertising,
we will never make it excessive.

2. We are here to stay, unlike various sellouts out there we are
planning to fight whomever fights us. In the long run the free man will
win.

In order to have the motivation to keep working on Seedler and paying
its costs without intoducing any advertising we need everyone’s help in
making it more popular.

Give them a visit, It’s worth it!

Seedler is down at the moment

Source: Seedler – Looks Fresh..