TorrentSpy Traffic Plunges After US Ban
Written by Ernesto on October 06, 2007The MPAA has caused TorrentSpy, once the most popular BitTorrent site, some serious headaches. After a federal judge ordered TorrentSpy to log all user data stored in RAM, they decided to block access to US users, consequently their traffic dropped significantly.
TorrentSpy founder Justin told TorrentFreak in a response to the censorship: “Whatever future awaits, the innovations of peer-to-peer technology and the jobs and opportunities it creates will take place outside of the USA.”
Although it is relatively easy for US users to access TorrentSpy through proxies such as UnblockTorrentSpy, most people get their .torrent files elsewhere. Torrent sites like Mininova, The Pirate Bay, Torrentz and Isohunt all benefited from the partial TorrentSpy shutdowns and continued to grow over the past months.
By the end of 2006 TorrentSpy was more popular that any other BitTorrent site, but times have changed. The graph below shows that Mininova now receives the most traffic, The Pirate Bay, Torrentz and Isohunt battle for second place and TorrentSpy dropped to the fifth position.
Censorship seems to be the new strategy employed by anti-piracy organizations these days. Not only did the MPAA manage to shut down TorrentSpy from US users, they’re also the reason why Isohunt blocked access to US users on their TorrentBox and PodTropolis tracker. The Pirate Bay on the other hand is banned in Turkey and even the P2P friendly Canadians are not safe anymore after the CRIA pressured demonoid to ban Canadians from their website.
A trend?
Note: Alexa’s data gathering is quite dubious. The exact figures may be not be completely accurate for smaller sites, but it is a great tool (especially the traffic rank) to compare larger sites within the same niche and to get a global impression of traffic shifts over time.
Previously: BitTorrent Addiction: The Thrill of the Chase
Next: Most Popular DVDrips on BitTorrent (wk40)
59 Responses
a trend….looks like
A trend that will either see US buck under the pressure and start standing up for them self, or they will just accept what their companies are doing to them.
Either way with or without the US P2P and the piracy scene will live long and hard its no lose to the rest of the world
The annoying thing is, anti-piracy people who were responsible will see that line and will consider it a ‘win’; completely ignoring the fact all those other trackers still have steadily increasing traffic..
A trend that I do not like. Anyone here heard that the eMule network is almost dead because of the eDonkey servers in Germany went down? Bigbang servers are also down. If any of you have eMule, you will only see a handful of servers.
And the other Edonkey servers (notice the “e”) are not real eDonkey servers.
As to the link unblock torrentspy its garbage i am a well seasoned pirate and I am unable to get the site to act right. Popups are horrible and the site is real unstable via the link.
I connect to it just fine in the U.S. I don’t use anything to do it either.
*all caveats included on the alexa method and the content of the graph*
looking solely at the relationship of the big 5 (which is about all that graph can tell you) they are pretty well matched
but where did the torrentspy traffik go? one would expect the graph to show the torrentspy traffic moving to another site (or spread between all the other sites) with an abnormal rise in rank as the torrentspy traffic arrived, but this is not evidenced in any blip in rank for any of the other 4 sites, in fact there is almost a flatlining of the rank trend from late July thru mid-September until the schools and universities reopen
so where did the torrentspy traffic go? you guessed it, nowhere. it is the same guys who visited torrentspy as still visit all the dump sites. only now they dont call at torrentspy no more
it doesnt make sense until you remember torrentspy this summer suspended its submit torrent function, take a look again at the graph and see if you can judge the exact week torrentspy stopped accepting uploads
it is common practise amongst members of smaller trackers to propagate their torrents to the big dump sites to increase the swarm size and gain publicity for their trackers. torrentspy has been dropped from the list of dump sites
torrentspy wants to be a torrent search engine but it is nowhere near as interesting a search engine as it was an interesting dump site. know your market, understand your capabilites, invest in your core activity
*torrentz never did accept uploads, its trend therefore has zero correlation as a dump site*
most emule users are switching to kads rather edonkey server
I just hope Canada has a fat role.. Its just sad demonoid had to take the same course of action.
Shame. I used TorrentSpy after the demise of suprnova, i liked the comments function. However the intrusive advertising became a bit too much for me (that f-ing mosquito).
I’m sure TorrentSpy is going to hang around for a while.
[quote comment="181989"]so where did the torrentspy traffic go? you guessed it, nowhere. it is the same guys who visited torrentspy as still visit all the dump sites. only now they dont call at torrentspy no more
it doesnt make sense until you remember torrentspy this summer suspended its submit torrent function, take a look again at the graph and see if you can judge the exact week torrentspy stopped accepting uploads[/quote]
Interesting alternative analysis. Cheers.
REMOVED SPAM
Any word on what happened to Meganova.org? Site redirects to Seedpeer, which I never heard of before.
someone ban that spammer #12..
[quote comment="182033"]Any word on what happened to Meganova.org? Site redirects to Seedpeer, which I never heard of before.[/quote]
They Changed their name because they were tired of the “nova”.
i wonder how demonoid stacks up in the graph. you never seem to mention it, but i’ve always found everything i needed with it. best tracker.
@Ernesto:
Thanks for the info. Well, atm (with suprnova returning) the *nova namespace is pretty packed.
[quote comment="182081"]i wonder how demonoid stacks up in the graph[/quote]
you can do the graph yourself at alexa.com
simply look up demonoid.com then add the other trackers into the graph for comparison
i did that and it is obvious why Ernesto ommitted demonoid from the graph above, demonoid have their own problems and it is clearly shown in their chart
Please stop referring to Alexa. Their rankings make no sense.
i am so glad to see that demonoid was not mentioned in the story. I am so sick and tired of their B.S. that I honestly hope they die.
addendum to last post. The big, bad D wasn’t mentioned as a major tracker
[quote comment="182106"]Please stop referring to Alexa. Their rankings make no sense.[/quote]
There’s been quite a debate about that, but Alexa traffic rank is pretty accurate to compare the larger BitTorrent sites. I actually confirmed the Alexa data with real stats (from several BitTorrent sites) a while ago and there was almost a perfect correlation. Accuracy goes down if the sites have a different target audience or a smaller audience.
I found this site that helps people use torrentSpy in the US. http://www.torrentspyusa.com
Swarmcast is the new legit
One shall fall, two shall rise.
You will kill ten of our men, and we will kill one of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it.
~ Ho Chi Minh
i don’t know if it’s just me, but i can still access torrentspy without going through any loops
http://proxy.org/
This is no great loss, there are still ways americans can access these sites and in the worst case all it will lead to is a re-emergence of the elite ftp servers breeding a whole new era of piracy and illegal activity.
This activity will not deter or stop those who are determined enough to do what they want, it will just force them into becoming more skilled at what they do.
Anybody that katows to RIAA/MPAA is PWOWNED .
Fight fire with fire: How much revenue have these sites lost due to the MPAA? Estimating that every user who is now no longer going to the site would represent say $750 in ad revenue; THIS LOSS IN REVENUE IS THE BIGGEST THREAT TO THE ECONOMY SINCE PIRACY, the figure being several hundred billion, I imagine.
I do kid, naturally, but isn’t this the tactic being used against them? Why not make it work for them?
I still use TorrentSpy, with the TOR network though!
[quote comment="182118"][quote comment="182106"]Please stop referring to Alexa. Their rankings make no sense.[/quote]
There’s been quite a debate about that, but Alexa traffic rank is pretty accurate to compare the larger BitTorrent sites. I actually confirmed the Alexa data with real stats (from several BitTorrent sites) a while ago and there was almost a perfect correlation. Accuracy goes down if the sites have a different target audience or a smaller audience.[/quote]
There’s nothing to debate really. Alexa traffic data collection only really works if their spyware cookies and registry entries remain on the computer accessing the sites it is tracking (or they get the site stats directly from a site admin).
Ergo: FireFox users that happened to run SpyBot (as an example), are no longer openly tracked by Alexa, but can still be tracked via site stats submitted by admins. Linux users? Not tracked at all apparently. The most common makeup of any site statistics by Alexa rely on the tie-in to Windows and Internet Explorer.
It’s quite common knowledge by now that Alexa has a deal with Microsoft to install the cookie in IE by default and the registry entries are in a default installation of Windows.
One of the first things I get rid of on any new Windows installation.
the other public trackers have picked up the traffic from torrentspy.
do you really think that many people just quit downloading.. I think not.
people will find the easiest way to get the stuff they want .. closing one site only makes other sites bigger.
the reason i stopped checking in with torrentspy (via proxy) is that they no longer sort their categories - i used to check in every day to see new apps abd music - but now they lump them all in one big multi-page “latest” bin that is just too noisy and extensive to sift through compared to before
if they ever bring back that function, i’ll start checking in every day as before
I have stopped using torrentspy too, but thats because the comments aren’t working anymore.
This comment:
“The comments are offline while we make needed changes. Hang in there, we’re hoping to be back soon.”
has been there for a very long time now. It doesn’t seem like the comments are coming back.
The fact that there were so many comments about the quality of the various torrents is what I think was the best thing about torrentspy.
LOL! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Do they really think BT is the source? They are as dumb as they look! P2P is just a blindfold of whats really out there.
Have you noticed how bad TorrentSpy is doing lately? Their adverts have gone up in quantity and down in morality.
Have you noticed their sudden popups, and sex/porn ads? And this is without using a proxy. This is their actual site.
Aside from that, the forum they were sharing no longer is connected to them. They seem to be loosing everything.
I say they move servers to a different country, and continue on as usual. Nothing can happen out of the ordinary if they are hosting in a different country, right?
-mason
mrnailbunny[@]hotmail.com
I still am trying to figure out if downloading a movie is really”illegal”. And if it is, How big of a deal is it really?
Ah whatever long live p2p and there will all be places like rapidshareunleashed.org to tell others the secrets to the real underground. Torrents will still be around, they just need to work on the next loop hole. I agree with AL, p2p isn’t where the elite traffic is anyways. And there’s tons of 0 day sites now, more than there were before all of this legal bullshit came about. Damn that blocking Canada, they just pissed off a bunch of people who have nothing better than to sit on their computers in the winter. I don’t think that was a smart move on their part.
Vote for Ron Paul 2008
And you won’t have to suffer any more!
As he is very pro P2P candidate.
would we be able to connect to torrentspy using a proxy?
Yea I wouldnt use the .com… http://www.unblocktorrentspy.net is much more reliable. They use vps’s in malasysia…
Piracy will never be stopped. You just CANNOT kill the world-wide-web! It’s WORLDWIDE haha! Yea, maybe you’ll stop the torrents. Fine. Torrents weren’t the beginning, and they are not the end. Stuff like DC++ was working great until they started banning hubs. Okay. Limewire was one of the best, shit was thrown into it, and it collapsed. And so many more examples. Torrents, well they were at their peak in 2005 I’d say, at least that’s what my personal experience tells. then they started declining. But, you close one website, another one flourishes, stronger than the one before.
you just cannot stop it. :)
To users: don’t stop from downloading. What can they do? Umm send the special forces over…and take all the millions to prison? Really, is it just millions?
i was still downloading some games when torrent was block, and it was just this much: 99.4%. Now I have to redownload again.
Last week this was up and running, today no go :( i am located in Australia and now no luck with torrentspy
Thank you for the quality service you have provided for so long torrentspy.com -UK
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