TorrentFreak

• Ernesto
• January 2, 2007
• 43
• alexa,
  btjunkie,
  isohunt,
  mininova,
  pirate_bay,
  puretna,
  thepiratebay,
  visited_websites
• Print

Torrentspy ended 2006 as the most popular BitTorrent site in terms of traffic. Mininova settled in second place this year. Last year’s winner, The Pirate bay, ended up in third place.

All three websites continued to grow in 2006, especially in the first half of the year. The graph below shows that they all entered the Alexa top 500 this spring, which means that they are among the 500 most visited websites on the Internet.

Over the past 6 months the traffic ranks began to stabilize. Here’s a graph of the traffic rank of October, November and December. As you can see, the traffic is quite stable in this period, apart from the returning spikes in the weekends.

Other BitTorrent sites that made it to the 1000 most popular sites on the Web in 2006 are:

329. Isohunt.com
454. Demonoid
642. Torrentz.com
962. Puretna.com (adult content)

The award for the most effective advertising campaign goes to BTjunkie. Overnight they jumped from a traffic rank of 20,000 to a spot among the 2,000 most visited sites, and they managed to keep the people in.

We reported before that BitTorrent sites are slowly taking over the Internet. And it is not only the larger search engines and trackers that continue to grow. I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of torrent sites in Alexa’s top 1000 doubles in 2007. Let’s see what the new year brings.

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.

1. Torrentspy.com (Alexa rank: 176) 2. Mininova.org (Alexa rank: 207) 3. ThePirateBay.org (Alexa rank: 291) All three websites continued to grow in 2006, especially in the first half of the...