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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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:
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