The data for the most recent TV episodes are collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only. A list of the most pirated TV-shows of 2008 was published two weeks ago.

Thanks to ShowInsider we now also include a list based on the total number of downloads (not only recent episodes) of all shows in the past week.

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

Up until now, central servers have always been required in order to use BitTorrent effectively. Although the transfer of files via BitTorrent has always been decentralized, the .torrent files that are required to start sharing are always hosted on central servers, those of The Pirate Bay or Mininova for example.

The Tribler developers have found a way to make their client work, without having to rely on BitTorrent sites. Although others have tried to come up with similar solutions, such as the Cubit plugin for Vuze, Tribler is the first to understand that with decentralized BitTorrent search, there also has to be a way to moderate these decentralized torrents in order to avoid a flood of spam.

BuddyCast, the decentralized search feature of the Tribler client is able to do so. Tribler project leader Johan Pouwelse told TorrentFreak: “It has taken us many years to get the zero-server search infrastructure called ‘BuddyCast’ running fast and efficiently. We believe that today BuddyCast is the most efficient, scalable, and battle-hardened algorithm out there which is also ready for user tagging and ratings in true buzz-compliant 2.0 style.”

In addition to the decentralized torrent distribution and search capabilities, Tribler aims to make the BitTorrent experience more social. For instance, users will have the option to boost the download speed of friends, the client will give recommendations based on your download behavior, and it rewards users who are good sharers while punishing those who leech.

“Tribler peers all work together towards a common purpose: fast search and downloads,” Pouwelse explained. “Peers recognize fellow ‘tribe’ members and are pre-programmed with the notion that embracing mutual self-interest is good. This is a radical deviation from the core BitTorrent tit-for-tat mantra dictating pursuit of self-interest only and no memory of past experiences.”

Although this is only the first public implementation of the decentralized search feature, it seems to work pretty seamlessly. Obviously, the content is more limited than on the large BitTorrent sites, since it comes exclusively from other Tribler users, but this will grow as soon as more people start to use the client.

Decentralized BitTorrent search has the potential to make public BitTorrent sites no longer necessary. For now, we think that such a radical shift is not going to happen anytime soon, however, since the top-three BitTorrent sites are involved in legal action in some way or another, you never know when you might need it.

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

The data presented here is collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only.

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

It’s Heroes that breaks all the records though. Our statistics show that, across all BitTorrent sites, the two episodes from Heroes’ season opening were downloaded well over a million times each – in just one day. The vast majority of the downloads come from outside the US (92%), where shows usually air weeks, months or even years later.

The show was downloaded the most in the UK (15%), where the official season opening is scheduled for October 1st. Canada, France and Australia complete the top 5. Although most TV-broadcasters won’t be happy to read these figures, one could argue that BitTorrent has actually helped TV-shows to build a stronger, broader, and more involved fanbase.

Jesse Alexander, the executive producer of ‘Heroes’ told TorrentFreak that he thinks this is indeed the case. “People watching shows such as Lost and Heroes on BitTorrent is the present world reality. TV networks have to recognize this, give their viewers more ways to interact with the shows, and find ways to generate revenue from every member of the global audience,” he said.

Let’s hope Alexander will be heard in Hollywood. Below is the TV-show download chart of the past week, Heroes is not included in the list, but it will surely appear in next week’s chart.

Top Downloads September 14 – September 21

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

Like the other sites we mentioned, Instant-Torrents downloads the torrents to their servers. When the download is finished, users can download it to their computer. What’s different is that once a torrent is downloaded to Instant-Torrent, it will stay hosted on the server, and other users can find the files via the site’s search, and download them instantly.

Instant-Torrents is still low on content, but with enough users it will become unnecessary to add torrents by yourself, since most popular files will be hosted on the server anyway. The downside for the owners is of course that the MPAA, IFPI and RIAA will be keeping an eye on it as well.

Instant-Torrents shares all torrents till they have uploaded what they have downloaded, which makes it ’share friendly’. Users are allowed to have 5 torrents running at the same time, and there is no limit in size or numbers for completed torrents. “As long as there’s enough disk space, people can download as much as they want,” ‘Zero Endorphine’, one of the Instant-Torrents co-founders told us.

The service also has an option to make a watch list, to downloads torrents based on specific keywords, as soon as they are available. In addition, the site has lists of the last added, most downloaded and most recommended torrents, and it allows users to recommend torrents to their friends.

Instant-Torrents is itself a free service, but in order to download you’ll have to get a VPN account at Ivacy. This is because the files can only be downloaded to your PC if you’re connected to the (private) Ivacy network. There is a free 1GB trial available, so potential users can play around with it for free. A paid account costs 0.50 Euro ($0.70) per GB, or 10 Euro ($14.20) a month for unlimited bandwidth.

‘Zero Endorphine’, one of the Instant-Torrents co-founders told us that they get a revenue share from Ivacy, to cover the expenses they incur, such as bandwidth and server costs. The site has only been up and running for a few weeks, and ‘Zero Endorphine’ ensured us that they will add more innovative features in the near future.

“We already added Usenet support, in a few days we will support Rapidshare downloads as well, and we’re also working on integrated BitTorrent tracker search,” ‘Zero Endorphine’ said. Instant-Torrents offers an interesting addition to the most basic BitTorrent download services. Although we prefer BitTorrent to be free, the private nature of the site, and the instant downloads might make it worthwhile for some.

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

Other releases of the Olympics ceremony are popular as well, such as an iPod ready version of the first hour, a standard definition release of the opening ceremony, and a high definition capture of the torch lighting and fireworks. Three Olympic shows would have made it into our weekly TV-download chart, but we decided to count them as one.

The data of the TV-torrent chart is collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only.

At the end of the year we will publish a list of most downloaded TV-shows for the entire year, like we did last December.

Top Downloads August 03 – August 10

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

Since there’s always a lot of debate about what works and what doesn’t, we decided to ask an expert to share his thoughts with us. Olivier Chalouhi, developer and CTO of Vuze (formerly known as Azureus) was kind enough to give us some of his own tips and tricks. Since Olivier was the person who initiated the Azureus Open Source project in 2003, which went on to create one of the most popular BitTorrent clients ever, if anyone knows how to get the best out of your torrent client, he does.

Here are some of Olivier’s tips for optimizing your torrent download speeds. There tips work with every BitTorrent client, except for the last one.

1. Seed.

Downloading speeds will be sub-optimal for everyone unless everyone plays their part and seeds. Private tracker sites are a great example of how the overall speed of the swarm increases when everyone is seeding and downloading in equal measure. So, play your part in seeding and tell others to as well.

2. Be connectable.

Make sure you’re not “firewalled” by opening up your incoming ports or by enabling UPnP in your router, otherwise you’ll be leaving bandwidth on the table.

3. Manage your upload speed.

It is all about striking a balance. You don’t want the upload speed to be too high, nor do you want it to be too low. Ideally you want to set your upload speed to be 80% of the maximum possible line speed.

TF note: Want an easy life? Try this handy settings calculator, works for all clients

4. Select the right torrents.

Your download will be faster if you choose to download a torrent where there is a good balance of seeds and peers. For instance, Vuze ranks its search results according to the number of seeds and peers to make this easier.

5. Be realistic.

Check the swarm average and if you’re already above average, then you just need to be patient. If you’re below average, go back and check some of these other things I’ve mentioned.

6. Get a Friend Boost.

I wouldn’t be a Vuze developer if I didn’t give a plug for the Friend Boost feature we recently developed :). When you create a network of Friends on Vuze, you agree to seed content to each other on a preferential basis. That is, if one of your friends has a torrent that you want, you will be able to directly use a portion of their bandwidth to get it. In most cases this will increase your download speed.

Obviously, ways in which to actually implement some of these tips will differ from client to client. If you want to find out how to do it on Vuze, you can check out our wiki.

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

When we reported about the 3 billionth download back in November, Erik from Mininova told TorrentFreak: “We hope to reach the 4 billion mark in 4 or 5 months from now”. He didn’t have to wait that long, as it only took 78 days before they got there. The TV-show category remains the most popular, approximately half of all downloads from Mininova are torrents relating to TV-episodes.

The popularity of Mininova became apparent a few weeks ago when the site was offline for nearly a day because of hardware issues. The millions of visitors had to go elsewhere to feed their BitTorrent habit, and as a result, other sites like Torrentz.com and SumoTorrent saw a huge traffic increase, and almost went down under the strain.

The Mininova team will continue to optimize the site in order to handle the continuous traffic increase. On top of this, they are also adding new services and features such as a content distribution platform for independent publishers, a music streaming feature, and more recently, video streaming.

From the looks of it, Mininova’s growth will not be halted anytime soon, unless there is outside intervention. Last week, the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN announced that it will take legal action against the site, not to take it down, but to force it to filter copyrighted content. Erik from Mininova said in a response they “will proceed to court with full confidence,” and they will continue to serve torrents.

Mininova downloads since 2005.

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

The mininova team is working hard to get the site up and running again. The good news is that no data will be lost, the bad news is that it may take a while – possibly 12 hours – because it is a holiday in The Netherlands.

Mininova’s forums are not connected to the loadbalancer, and are still up and running. The same is true for the seeds of their featured content section. Mininova currently has well over 3 million unique visitors per day, and more than 15 million pageviews, which makes them the BitTorrent site with the most traffic.

Consequently, the downtime at Mininova has resulted in quite a few extra visitors for several other BitTorrent sites. Flippy, the admin of Torrentz.com told TorrentFreak that he’s seeing a 50% traffic increase, which works out at tens of thousands of visitors an hour. As a result, Flippy has had a tough time keeping his site running smoothly, and other BitTorrent site admins are reporting similar traffic boosts.

For now Torrentz is doing fine, except for a few server connection issues every now and then. It’s a pretty scary thought that server issues at mininova can almost bring down the fourth largest BitTorrent site. A whole ring of BitTorrent sites could potentially collapse like a house of cards.

update: SumoTorrent went down for 6 hours as well because the site was overloaded

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

This list of BitTorrent sites is not extensive, but it covers the three most popular torrent sites. A search for the recently released second part of Steal This Film returns quite a few results which are presented in a clean way. By default the results are ordered by popularity (seeds/peers), but they can be further sorted by date, size, and search engine.

If you can’t find what you were looking for you have the option to check for related and popular searches in the sidebar. At the moment the site has no ads and is pretty fast, but that might change in the future. Overall, for people who like meta search engines, I think that YouTorrent is worth a visit.

More useful BitTorrent sites can be found in our roundup of the 10 most popular BitTorrent sites of 2007. Do you know any other BitTorrent sites with some innovative features that we haven’t covered yet here at TorrentFreak? Let us know and leave a comment.

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

The BitLet team promised upgrades were on the way, and after a few short months, the BitLet ‘Upload’ section is now complete. With this addition, BitLet users can not only download torrents but also create them too, all done online within a regular browser. Entering the ‘Upload’ page, the user is asked to enter a tracker of their choice. Bitlet conveniently provides the option to select the urls of four popular open trackers for some seriously easy torrent creation.

Once created, the automation of the torrent creation process doesn’t stop. BitLet Upload gives the option to send the .torrent file immediately to Mininova, which is great for advertising the content the user is about to make available. Automatically sending to other sites will be possible in the future.

This is an important new addition to the online BitLet experience. Offering convenience to those who prefer to use a browser or simply have no choice, BitLet Upload brings BitTorrent distribution another step closer to the complete novice.

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

One of the benefits of offering media files for download via BitTorrent is that it takes the load off the server and decreases the chance of your site becoming inaccessible due to excessive bandwidth consumption.

Apparently HostGator doesn’t care, they want you to just store your podcasts, videos and other media files on their server instead of saving bandwidth by offering it as a .torrent file.

Unfortunately, it can become quite a costly affair if you surpass the bandwidth limit set by your host. Good for them of course, because that will increase your bandwidth bill, but not very customer friendly.

I can see that they don’t want you to run a BitTorrent tracker or a client on a shared server because these use quite a lot of resources, but there is absolutely no valid reason to simply ban .torrent files. As far as I can see this would only save bandwidth and thus resources.

And it gets even worse, you’re also not allowed to: “Participate in any file-sharing/peer-to-peer activities”

This is getting ridiculous, most webhosting companies at least have good reasons to disallow certain activities on their servers. But, just banning everything that’s related to filesharing like HostGator does is a little too much if you ask me.

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

Moxie, a Comcast customer who replied to a post on Silicon Alley, points out that when you log your network activity with an application like Wireshark, you’ll notice that Comcast servers start sending reset messages as soon as a download is finished, exactly as we described it.

With Wireshark in the background run your BitTorrent application. Wait until completed and watch Wireshark, notice when it finishes seeding Comcast servers send out a reset command every second to your computer noted by the highlighted red line in Wireshark. It is 8:30 pm Monday pst and Comcast is still resting my BitTorrent connections. Maybe the PR guy didn’t get the email from the VP of Networking.

It might be that not every Comcast customer is equally affected, but a significant percentage is. Not only the 10+ users we talked to before we first reported this issue, but also hundreds of additional commenters here on TorrentFreak, and elsewhere. Some users even captured the throttling in progress on video (download), and anyone has to agree that this does look very suspicious.

More evidence comes from Robb Topolski, a networking and protocol expert with more than 25 years of experience, who first wrote about this issue on DSLReports. He told TorrentFreak: “We have had two Comcast techs confirm Sandvine in use, but neither confirmed or denied its connection with the RST interference. For me, seeding is possible. I can reach my upload speed limit, but there sure is a lot of interference. Since your article came out, I too have received many reports of seeding being impossible. I’m not sure if it’s regional, or what!”

For the networking savvy people among us, here’s an example of real RST interference on an unencrypted BitTorrent connection. In this case, it happens right after the bitfields are exchanged

Nevertheless Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas said in a response to Light Reading: “We’re not blocking access to any application, and we don’t throttle any traffic”. He might be right here semantically speaking, they are not throttling anything, they just kill all outgoing connections when a clients starts to seed a file. But the fact is that Comcast is making it impossible for (at least some) customers to share files with non-Comcast users over BitTorrent.

Luckily there is a fix for this problem, and we know that at least two BitTorrent client developers are including this fix in their next update.

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

Pressure from anti-piracy lobbyists is not really a new phenomenon for the Swedish authorities. A month prior to the Pirate Bay raid, Executive Vice President of the MPAA wrote a letter (PDF) to Sweden’s State Secretary in which he stated:

“It is certainly not in Sweden’s best interests to earn a reputation among other nations and trading partners as a place where utter lawlessness with respect to intellectual property rights is tolerated.”

Perhaps even worse, after the raid it became apparent that the US had threatened to put Sweden on WTO’s blacklist because they didn’t take the Pirate Bay down.

However, these and other threats won’t solve the case. Unfortunately for some, the police need actual evidence if they want to take legal action against The Pirate Bay, something that they don’t have at this point. Even after more than a year, the police have nothing to go on.

Up until today, The Pirate Bay servers remain in custody and the police still hope to find something. In fact, prosecutor HÃ¥kan Roswall is still convinced that he will eventually press charges against the Pirate Bay admins. The Pirate Bay is not really impressed by this announced prosecution, and according to a leak within the Swedish police, they don’t have much to be afraid of.

Below is a copy of the letter sent last month on behalf of the Portuguese counterparts of the RIAA, BSA and MPAA.

Re: Pirate Bay
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Dear Sir.
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We address yourself in our capacities of Directors of the Portuguese Artists and Musicians collecting society GDA. the Portuguese Antí-Piracy Video, Games, Cable Operators and local MPA Association, Fevip, and the local IFPI National Group, AFP (Record Producers), concerning the pirate Bay case.
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As you are aware, both physical and digital piracy is severely affecting the Music and Film industry worldwide and Portugal is no exception.
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The Portuguese music market, lost about 50% of its value during the last 5 years, as well as half of the sales and jobs, affecting the live hood of our Authors, Com posers , Artists, Musicians, Actors, Video and Record producers.
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One of the main reasons for this crisis is digital piracy, due lo poor enforcement of the law and the fact that more and more households have now broadband access (according lo Anacom, the Portuguese National Authority for Telecoms, 14.3% of the Portuguese households have now broadband access – 1st quarter 2007).
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Among the different digital threats, the most important are the services that use the Bit Torrent Protocol, due lo the fact that this type of service allows users to download films and the entire discography of an Artist within minutes.
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In the Portuguese courts there are now over 40 criminal claims against and some of them relate to the Bit Torrent Protocol, and we have reasons lo believe that some of the Torrents downloaded by the Portuguese torrent users may well come from Pirate Bay.
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The reason we write to you is the fact that this case In Sweden is pending for more than one year and during this time the Pirate Bay activities is affecting right holders around the world. We therefore kindly urge you to take the necessary steps to come lo a swift enforcement of the law in this case.
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We trust you will understand our concerns and act accordingly in order to stop the effects this case has outside the Swedish borders.
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With kind regards,

Director General AFP
Director General FEVIP
Director General GDA

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

The owner of SumoTorrent told TorrentFreak that he discovered that A search on Google for sumotorrent now triggers the following message at the bottom of the results page:

“In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.”

A search for other BitTorrent sites like Torrentspy and Torrentreactor comes up with the same message (note. the sites are still indexed but some results are removed). Strangely enough, for torrentreactor it only shows up for a search on the .com domain.

According to Google the filtered search results are caused by DMCA complaints , but the owner of SumoTorrent is a little surprised by this. He has no clue why the “content owner” didn’t contact him directly because he generally processes takedown notices within 24 hours. Unfortunately the link Google provides to the complaint in question doesn’t work, and a search on ChillingEffects.org doesn’t really help much either.

One of the few BitTorrent related DMCA complaints Google received concerned Paris Hilton’s famous . This notice was sent by Jim Salomon, the brother of Rick Salomon who used to date Paris. The complaint is hilarious, Jim even complains why it takes Google more than 4 hours to remove the .torrent in question. Funny or not, eventually Google decided to remove the .torrent file in question from their search results.

What Google has done isn’t really that revolutionary because most administrators of BitTorrent sites take down torrent files themselves upon request. However, the main reason for this is that they don’t want endless legal battles. They see it as a service to the content owners to remove the .torrent files if a decent request is made. But I kind of hoped that Google would make a stand here, wishful thinking so it seems.So what do you think? Should Google filter their results like this?

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

A good way to check whether a torrent is legit or not is by looking at the comments. If people found the torrent to be fake, it will probably reported there. But up until now there was no central database for checking fake and spam torrents – TorrentSpam is trying to fill this gap. A search for the torrent name on TorrentSpam will return a list of torrents, and the score each torrent has indicates how likely it is that this torrent is actually SPAM.

Some administrators of BitTorrent sites (not all of them) already spend hours every day removing and blocking these fake or malware ridden torrents, but it is nearly impossible to have a 100% clean site at all times.

TorrentSpam will be really useful if admins of BitTorrent sites have access to their database, something that will happen in the near future. The site is currently working on an API section so all torrent sites can utilize TorrentSpam. In the meantime they obviously need you to fill (and check) the database.

Or as the admin of TorrentSpam puts it: “The more reported torrents the better the P2P experience! By letting people know of invalid torrents, the less data will be jamming the networks.”

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

I’ve tried it with a couple of torrents and it seems to be working quite well, just enter the url of the .torrent file and you’re good to go. The download speeds are decent and doesn’t require any configuration, so it’s pretty much idiot-proof.

BitLet also has a very useful code generator so you can offer BitTorrent downloads on your blog or website so that people can easily download, even when they don’t have a BitTorrent client installed. If people click on the link a popup window will appear, and the download starts immediately. Here’s an example download link:

Steal This Film!

If everything works like it should you’ll get a popup window similar to the screenshot below, it currently shows the download speed, percentage completed, and even a status led that signals potential problems (green is good). BitLet uses the Sun Java platform, if you encounter any problems, try installing the latest Java Virtual Machine plugin from Sun.

Personally I think that BitLet is a great way to make BitTorrent available to the occasional downloader who is not familiar with it at all. It could also be very helpful if you want to download a torrent on a PC that doesn’t have a BitTorrent client installed, like work or school for some people. It’s not a replacement for the regular BitTorrent client, but it sure is a great addition.

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

Born March 18 1976, Marnie Stern is an American singer-songwriter and a great guitarist. In 2007 she launched her debut album ‘In Advance of the Broken Arm‘ which the New York Times called “the year’s most exciting rock ‘n’ roll album”.

During an interview with Pitchfork Media this week, she tells us about her favorite song (The Who’s “Baba O’Riley”), her most recent favorite book (The Listening Book) and even her favorite ringtone.

But Marnie is troubled. Marnie is troubled because she thinks she’s going to jail. What could a rock star have done to deserve this? Smashing up a hotel room? Drugs? Driving under the influence?

….try ‘downloading movies using BitTorrent’. That’s right; Marnie is a secret BitTorrent user.

When asked about the last great movie she saw, she responded “Since I’ve been here I have downloaded…I mean I feel I’m going to jail– well, I discovered the torrent– but I feel I’ve downloaded, I would say, honestly 40 or 50 movies, which I hear isn’t that bad, you know, for jail. But I mean, because I’ve pretty much been staying in the studio and a little bit with Zach [Hill], I have all of this time to just sit….”

Don’t worry Marnie! Downloading (or even uploading) movies in the United States is a civil issue (as long as you stay away from still-in-theater movies and pre-air TV shows), so you can relax – you won’t be going to jail for it. In the unlikely event that you’re caught in the act, you might get a notice from your Internet Service Provider demanding that you don’t do it again. In reality, this is usually as far as things go.

When asked about her favorite TV show, Marnie comes back to BitTorrent. “House! Now let me tell you, I missed three of the episodes– hello torrent! You just download them right away.”

Maybe Marnie will be automating everything in future after reading one of our guides.

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

Several topics are discussed including the new “anonymous P2P protocol”, which is not their secret project, that they are currently working on.

Making all transfers anonymous will be the future of filesharing according to Brokep. No more lawsuits and privacy for everyone.

Among other things, Brokep talks about censorship, copyright, lawsuits, Sealand and why we need more BitTorrent trackers to keep the community alive.

I could of course embed the video here, but I think The BitLord show deserves some credit. Check out the interview with Brokep over here.

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.