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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122 Responses
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I agree with #8.
They now suck with the unpopular legal torrents.
Watch the traffic drop way down!!!
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True Stuff
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TRUE STUFF
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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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