YouTorrent Goes Legal, and Up For Sale
Written by Ernesto on April 13, 2008In just a matter of weeks since its launch, YouTorrent has become one of the most popular BitTorrent meta-search engines. This weekend, however, it revealed a shift in strategy and it now only indexes sites that host torrent files linking to “licensed” content.
Unsurprisingly, the enormous success of the site even inspired others to start similar projects. None of these came close to YouTorrent’s success, which now attracts over 10 million unique visitors a month.
YouTorrent’s selling points are the great interface, an ad-less design, and its ability to search most of the bigger BitTorrent sites. The latter has changed though, and this might very well be the end of YouTorrent’s popularity.
Patrick, one of the people running YouTorrent told TorrentFreak: “Due to the uncertain nature of the source and accuracy of the results returned by some engines, we have decided to reduce our engine selection to ones that claim the provision of licensed, certified content.”
It doesn’t stop there. YouTorrent is not only going ‘legal’, but Patrick is also looking into selling the site. “The YouTorrent project has grown very quickly and unfortunately is not in line with the owning companies core business,” Patrick said.
“We have had some interest [to buy] from some parties. On that basis, we have presented the site to other parties in the space to see if there is interest there also,” he added.
It is unfortunate to see that YouTorrent has to throw in the towel only 4 months after it launched. One thing is clear, they haven’t made any money so far, since there weren’t any ads on the site. Selling the site could make the YouTorrent team quite a few bucks though, it almost looks like this was the plan anyway.
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93 Responses
fair do’s.
if i had that sort of traffic coming to a domain i’d cash in for sure.
pizzatorrent is a better equivalent anyway
Go YouTorrent =D
Woop Woop First
x
nice nice i love it … cheers from south america
It does look like they planned it like this from the start. Not having ads and gunning for increasing page views isn’t sustainable.
Must have been pretty expensive for them to run it with that amount of traffic.. Wonder where the cash has come from..
YouTorrents peer stats were always complete bollocks. I seriously doubt they will be getting 10 million vistors by hosting legit torrents though. Kudos to them for going down the legit path, no doubt there will be the fair share of comments from the haters and freetards for whom the idea of a legal torrent is somewhat alien.
Good bye & Good luck! :-)
Yawn. Legal torrents bore me.
this is just bad, lame i say. use ads and get going again.
funnily enough i tried to use it earlier.
And i thought we have they taken all the decent sites out and made it shit????
I’ll buy it for a fiver.
This is one hell of a stunt YouTorrent has pulled on the community. I personally hope no one buys the site and they loose every penny they’ve put into it.
YouTorrent is baloney. They offer like 5-6 torrent sites. I rather use Pizzatorrent and Torrentz, they are much better…and of course, no ads with AdBlock :)
*pop*
Are there “illegal torrents in your contry? Geez
Sounds like a smart business move. Having a popular interface that indexes only legal torrents will certainly encourage publishers to use BT as a distribution method. There are some drawbacks to publishing legit content on sites otherwise associated with piracy and this might be the fix.
[quote comment="344088"]Go YouTorrent =D
Woop Woop First
x[/quote]
Dimbulb…
(P.S. Buhbye, youtorrent.com)
[quote comment="344171"]YouTorrent is baloney. They offer like 5-6 torrent sites. I rather use Pizzatorrent and Torrentz, they are much better…and of course, no ads with AdBlock :)[/quote]
Actually they _used_ to offer more. They had an option to add or remove more predefined trackers, including torrentz.
[quote comment="344171"]YouTorrent is baloney. They offer like 5-6 torrent sites. I rather use Pizzatorrent and Torrentz, they are much better…and of course, no ads with AdBlock :)[/quote]
Actually they _used_ to offer more. They had an option to add or remove more predefined trackers, including torrentz.
never even heard of it
i hope the dosent get brought by some random compnay that inserts annoying popups and shit cause that would sux
there you go, youtorrent, gone from my bookmarks.
Pizzatorrent seems to be a better alternative.
Im going to check out other search sites.. I noticed the reduction last night (in trackers)…
[quote comment="344214"]Sounds like a smart business move. Having a popular interface that indexes only legal torrents will certainly encourage publishers to use BT as a distribution method. There are some drawbacks to publishing legit content on sites otherwise associated with piracy and this might be the fix.[/quote]
Sounds like a idiotic business move for anyone who purchases the site for anything more than what the domain name is worth.
THIS IS A CLASSIC BAIT AND SWITCH
YouTorrent SUX! There business plan, pertaining to their site users, reads as follows: “Find’em, F@ck’em, Forget’em!”
Deleted from my bookmarks also!
and just like that, youtorrent is suddenly useless.
[quote comment="344214"]Sounds like a smart business move. Having a popular interface that indexes only legal torrents will certainly encourage publishers to use BT as a distribution method. There are some drawbacks to publishing legit content on sites otherwise associated with piracy and this might be the fix.[/quote]
Publishers wanting to distribute content would be foolish to limit distribution only through fully licensed content channels. It completely contradicts the driving force behind the desire for distribution.
Youtorrent has thrown axe on his own feet. Good bye youtorrent.
Still have my focus on Torrentz.
FUCK YouTorrent
http://thepiratebay.org/
http://btjunkie.org/
@dyslexic
it’s more like taking down non-legal torrents. That is a bad thing.
@Smartiez
like as if there aren’t enough of those. as far as I know, bittorrent.com already does that
this disgusts me. I’m removing their search engine from firefox now.
[quote comment="344214"]Sounds like a smart business move. Having a popular interface that indexes only legal torrents will certainly encourage publishers to use BT as a distribution method. There are some drawbacks to publishing legit content on sites otherwise associated with piracy and this might be the fix.[/quote]
So you people just care about business. File-sharing is all about money to you. Too corrupted to consider the intellectual, social, or artistic value of things.
Christ! I just visited the site for the first time, clicked on a random torrent (which didn’t look very legal to me) and got bombarded with popups telling me my security was being breached and I needed to download a fix. I had to ALT+F4 the fuck out of there.
Never again do I go there. I can’t see how their domain is worth more than about 99 cents, as the vast majority of visitors wanted “illegal” stuff. Successful legal torrent sites will come from the big companies like Google and Apple, not some start-ups that aren’t aware that the dotcom bubble burst in 2002.
[quote comment="344354"]
So you people just care about business. File-sharing is all about money to you. Too corrupted to consider the intellectual, social, or artistic value of things.[/quote]
Having sites that promote legal torrents is not necessarily synonymous with monetizing them. I’m all for keeping the files free! I spoke of this development as a business move because it was in fact a move made by a busines, but I am well aware that there are much broader social and cultural changes happening along with these technologies.
Oh, and thanks for jumping to such an off-base conclusion about what type of person I am from a three sentence comment. Brilliant.
Search your torrents at
http://searchp2p.weebly.com/
they should have sold it before they went legal so that their numbers would be high. I bet they went from 10million hits a month to 10. I just removed it from my bar and am never going there ever again.
So long and good luck.
used it up up until yesterday when they did the change now i do not the owner has completely missed the point as to why it was so popular and now will suffer when the good little boy from accounts shows them a nice graph of seriously depleting visitors
Weak. I thought it was broken when I used it this afternoon.
Now I read this to discover the owners broke it on purpose.
Oh well, I got no problem going back to checking the sites on my own.
might have had legal problems
*deleted from bookmarks
Fuck them.
юторрент фтопку!!11
I tried it but it was a very crappy search engine. Didn’t understand phrases and would expand short words to longer words with that prefix. Gave too many crappy responses that weren’t worth diving through. I went back to the main search engines.
Nothing of value was lost.
“Selling the site could make the YouTorrent team quite a few bucks though, it almost looks like this was the plan anyway.”
Nuff said. :thumbsdown:
what a dumb move. what good is a search engine if ends up censoring results?
*sigh* such a great site, such a sad demise.
Well, while Demonoid reestablishes itself, I guess I’m off to Pizza Torrent.
Huh;
I liked youTorrent, have been using it more and more to catch up on some TV shows; sellouts.
Legal torrents are a significant fraction of torrent trade, and are an extremely important part of torrent trade.
But illegal torrents are a much more significant fraction of torrent trade, and are a much much more important part of torrent trade.
The censorship and loss of digital freedom on the internet alone are sufficient moral justification for an underground data system; while this underground can and should incorporate all data - including legal data - into its domain, the instant it becomes as censored as the internet is the instant it not only becomes as degenerate as the internet, but loses all value and credibility.
And youTorrent has implemented censorship of this underground digital system.
YouTorrent, you might not die; but your traffic is going to drop 90%+;
the rest of the world is censored, we will not stand for this last refuge to be violated.
I encourage you to enter the legal market, and I hope you flourish; but I will not stand for blanket censorship, and therefore you have dropped from go-to guy for everything, to one of many options for legal torrents.
Good Day, sir.
PizzaTorrent > YouTorrent
fuck, it was good, why the hell did they make suicide by making it “legal”
You torrent, u made the whole torrent world look really sick today!!!Fuckers!
Do these people (the ones running it and anyone who’d now be interested in buying it) have the IQ of a cabbage?
Are they really stupid enough to think that the site will maintain the same level of popularity after they’ve eliminated the number one reason people used it?
I wonder who will be stupid enough to waste good money on buying YouTorrent ?
Well, every day there is a new rich fool …
Any proof on 10m uniques? Or just taking what Jonathan tells you for fact?
still surfing http://www.toorents.to as I never used this shaky meta searches.
This was no doubt the plan all along. Who’d be stupid enough to buy it now? Past traffic volume will have no bearing on it’s value after the changes, and could not be used to gauge it’s worth.
“Due to the uncertainty of linked torrents” meaning “we’ve decided to turn traitor to bittorrent due to our greed and want to see if some sucker will buy it so we can sellout”
CORRECT: http://www.torrents.to
sorry…
Who would invest? Your not going to get no where near the visitors by searching legal torrents only.
Its crazy how many people dog on such projects. IF you hate it move on. Like the owners said the project get to big to fast for them and they dont know what to do. 10mil is not wrong just look at how many back links they have. and how many comments on this blog. I hope they get a good price. Alot of time went in to the project.
[quote comment="344277"][quote comment="344214"]Sounds like a smart business move. Having a popular interface that indexes only legal torrents will certainly encourage publishers to use BT as a distribution method. There are some drawbacks to publishing legit content on sites otherwise associated with piracy and this might be the fix.[/quote]
Sounds like a idiotic business move for anyone who purchases the site for anything more than what the domain name is worth.
THIS IS A CLASSIC BAIT AND SWITCH
YouTorrent SUX! There business plan, pertaining to their site users, reads as follows: “Find’em, F@ck’em, Forget’em!”
Deleted from my bookmarks also![/quote]
Damn Well Said !!
And Youtorrent .. Blow Me.
I will give YouTorrent 10 cents to own the site. But I would like to be able to claim it back on tax. Because when I buy it my losses will be huge. I may go bankrupt.
PizzaTorrent fills the gap just fine.
agreed, i used to love the site, but its gone from my bookmarks, so long youtorrent.
have they just made it legit to make it more sellable? anything stopping the new owner putting it back the way it was?
YouTorrent was my favorite torrent engine! Now it’s useless…
I liked that they supported Linux and Mozilla.
PizzaTorrent is the only other halfway-decent engine of that kind. I preferred YT though.
Dont give a crap what they do with the site, its ‘LEGAL’ now so it was dead at that moment, the rest is irrelevant.
ha ha ha youtorrent you pussy
i stopped using it as soon as pizzatorrent came into being.
Fuck that unorganized youtorrent shit. And now Demonoids back so it might as well do legal shit
They are making the site legal because it would be hard to sell the site if it is doing Illegal things and it would reduce the price the site could be sold for
it was a decent site.
there is http://www.scrapetorrent.com which is just as good.
I wondered what the hell was going on last night.
Never gave YouTorrent a try. And now there’s no need to anymore.
never heard of it. don’t care. anyone who used it was played. i’m proud *not* to be someone who made them profit from my patronage.
bye youtorrent but pizzatorrent is not available for me..
Nobody made a JewTorrent joke yet?
underground-gamer.com busted?
Just try the search and it sucks now. Well, YouTorrent is going off my bookmarks. Cya
I was a daily user of Youtorrent. This is fucking bad news.
For a group that wants to “sell” the portal, restrict the results was a big bad idea, because most of people that used to use the portal went to others, then loosing users… How someone could buy this portal if the big traffic go away ?
so, youtorrent was in the past now…
sorry..
Not only were their stat claims complete bollocks they are merely caving to the pressures of the anti-p2p community. The core business holders are simply terrified of being pursued legally and taken to court over p2p licensing content.
Patrick do the p2p community a favour and please shut your horrible site down.
As for the n00b going on about this being a smart business move. Sure it is, let’s give them 6 months and we’ll see just how fantastic those visitor stats are. Piracy is a fact of life and there is no way whatsoever that it will EVER be stopped. So your dream about this being a legit business idea fell short comparatively like your post.
Cheers!!
I’ve never even tried it. All such “projects” with glamour names make me very suspicious. Usually (read: always) their creators are greedy rats. They want money and only money.
And of course this Patrick is no exception. Good riddance, scumbag. :-)
I had never heard of it or used it.
Didn’t use it, don’t plan to now that’s only hosting “legal” content plus they are going to just sell out. Not that I wouldn’t do it if I was in their position but it doesn’t really inspire me to use the site. Oh well, I guess.
[quote comment="344244"]never even heard of it[/quote]
Same here. Must be something the noobs use.
lol i liked this site the way it was before, so long youtorrent.
It’s lost its place in my bookmarks.
I agree with #8.
They now suck with the unpopular legal torrents.
Watch the traffic drop way down!!!
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
True Stuff
^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
TRUE STUFF
^
youtorrent had a nice interface and allowed you to search a variety of trackers. They also let you remove the garbage trackers who lie about seeder counts to appear at the top of search results (I’m looking at YOU, monova and sumotorrent).
Now that the option to add/remove trackers is gone, the site is *utterly useless*. Why couldn’t they just default to searching the ‘legal’ sites, but continue to allow the option to search the good ones.
Youtorrent was kind of cool, but it has just imploded. move along, nothing to see here. six months from now we won’t even remember that it ever existed.
Get to the you swoop
http://pluking.blogspot.com
seriously, who want to buy a site who is affected by interface defacement… you can insert any html/javascript code via the searh bar!!! youtorrent is a real joke and torrentfreak seem to really like this shit…
dont pay for your torrents, just get it from somewhere els.
41crew
torrentfreak love this shit
$250 for the original article?
What a load of crap.
I used to love YouTorrent, now that this have happen I cannot love it anymore… </3
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