When we announced that YouTorrent was launching, I don’t think we expected the site to grow in popularity as quickly as it did. A month after its launch the site was pulling in 2.5 million visitors and climbing – quickly. It even caught ‘Jon’ the owner of YouTorrent off guard, although he couldn’t have been that surprised after investing a considerable $20,000 to secure the YouTorrent.com domain. The site doesn’t even have adverts to finance itself. And is now up for sale. Hmmm. Surprises all round, then – and some.
“My goal is to be in the top 100 most-visited sites on the Internet in two years,” ‘Jon’ told BusinessWeek. “If I can corner the torrent market, everyone would rely on the site for profits, just as people look to Google for search-based advertising revenue.”
Yesterday, Patrick from YouTorrent told us: “The YouTorrent project has grown very quickly and unfortunately is not in line with the owning company’s core business.”
Unfortunately, the chances of becoming the BitTorrent equivalent of Google have evaporated. Having courted the file-sharing masses and gained huge amounts of free publicity as a result, the site is only now of interest to a tiny subset of them and it appears that for many, the site will never be useful again. So having just lost 99% of its original target market, it won’t be as much use to advertisers either. Wait….the site doesn’t have any ads……
This is getting confusing. Back to the matter in hand.
Top 10 YouTorrent (meta-search) Alternatives
1. PizzaTorrent
PizzaTorrent was the first YouTorrent clone, so it deserves to be top of the list.
2. NowTorrents
Another YouTorrent clone.
3. Torrentz
Fast, clean and reliable. Probably the best meta-search engine out there.
4. LookTorrent
A relatively new meta-search engine that presents search results in separate tabs
5. Torrents.to
Torrent.to uses a toolbar at the top of the page to search several BitTorrent sites.
6. Morrent
A meta-search engine with categories and advanced search operators.
7. Torrent-Finder
Searched more that 100 private and public BitTorrent sites, the results open in separate tabs.
8. TorrentScan
TorrentScan allows you to search 13 BitTorrent sites from one page.
9. BitDig
This could be a great site if they decided to got rid of the excessive advertising.
10. TorrentScoop
A meta serach engine powered by the Google coop service.
BitTorrent meta-search engines can be a great and easy way to find torrents. However, they are useless if all the sites they index host the same .torrent files. So, no matter how useful these site may seem, they are pretty much useless if there are no trackers.
Do you know any other new BitTorrent sites that are worth visiting? Leave a comment and share it with us…
