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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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.
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