YouTorrent Relaunches with 67,170 Legal Torrents
Written by Ernesto on July 16, 2008YouTorrent is without a doubt the most talked about newcomer in the BitTorrent scene this year. The site initially indexed all the popular torrent sites, but switched to purely ‘verified’ torrents after receiving legal threats. Today, YouTorrent officially relaunches with 67,170 “legal” torrents, good for 6 TBs of data.
When we first wrote about YouTorrent, we never expected the site to grow in popularity as quickly as it did. A month after its launch the site was getting millions of visitors, and it continued to grow. In fact, no BitTorrent site had ever grown as fast as YouTorrent.
Unfortunately this astronomical growth didn’t last. In April the meta-search engine stopped indexing sites like The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, and other sources that provide links to unauthorized copyrighted files. They even considered selling the site at the time, but this never went though. Unsurprisingly, this change cost the site most of its visitors, who moved on to YouTorrent alternatives.
After a while however, the traffic stabilized, and a few weeks later it started to grow again. Today, four months after this drastic change, YouTorrent is ready to move on, as it launches the largest legal torrent search engine with tens of thousands of torrents adding up to a whopping 6TB of data.
“We feel that a full meta-search engine is a better experience for our users considering our switch to legal content,” Patrick, the co-founder of YouTorrent said. “We now return accurate seed and peer data and results are quick and easy to navigate, and more in line with traditional search engine result pages.”
The new site searches verified torrents on sites such as Jamendo, Vuze, BitTorrent, Legaltorrents, Legittorrents, Gameupdates, Wortharchiving, BT.etree and Mininova’s featured torrents section. By default the results are ordered by relevance, but they can also be sorted by number of seeds and peers, the size of the torrent, the upload dates and the number of total downloads so far.
For music files, YouTorrent has also included a link to the Bitlet streaming tool, so users can preview tracks before they decide whether or not they want to download them. Similar to the old design, there is a list of related searches in the sidebar, which may serve as inspiration. The YouTorrent blog has been updated, and has some great content as well.
Patrick further told us that they are currently working on a content distribution platform. This will allow individual publishers to upload files to the site, and YouTorrent will make sure that the files are seeded. The content distribution platform will be similar to Mininova’s CD, but Patrick assured us that it will include some great features that are unique to YouTorrent.
“Although we have lost some traffic we are still very popular and serving hundreds of thousands of searches a day,” Patrick said. “This is very encouraging and we believe with the new service this will continue to grow as our content aggregation reach and depth increases.”
Going legal has cost the site more than half of its traffic. The new interface and several other updates are aiming to get at least some of these visitors back, and make the site one of the big players in the “legal” torrent niche. Time will tell if they have made the right decision.
YouTorrent’s New Look
Previously: QuebecTorrent Clone Outmanoeuvres Music Industry
Next: EU to Extend Copyright, Break Royalty Monopolies
56 Responses
don’t like the way they’ve tried making the results look like google. was better before. completely screwed a pretty good site, ah well.
Caved in, left quite a few people feeling “betrayed”.
I wish them the best of luck because I’m sure they will never be as popular as before they gave in.
YouTube, YouPorn, YouTorrent…
**** YOU!
I’ll stick to illegal torrents thank you.
I don’t like… I did a few searches and it was not good…
Definitively, I prefer Mininova…
Actually Anon, with that trend wouldn’t it be You****?
Anywho, while I don’t tend to use “legit” torrent sites, I think their growth is important for to future of torrents. Once companies and the public in general realize the usefulness of torrent technology, the more accepted it will become. While outfoxing the MAFIAA is a great motivator for developing better torrent technology, imagine what could exist with funded R&D…
I don’t like… I did a few searches and it was not good…
Definitively, I prefer Mininova…
torrentz ftw!
torrentz is shit! Lately its just a mininova mirror!
I agree with #3
but also it’s good to see legal torrent sites, the do help legitimise the whole bitorrent community.
would like to see indytorrent for new upcoming independent artists to showcase their work and promote gigs etc.
I didn’t use it before, but I do think that legal torrents need more attention. I’ve heard some great music on Jamendo and etree has great shows on it.
For one thing you cant browse torrents.. you have to have something to search for.. unless im missing something.
This means you have no idea whats on the site, so you dont know what the site can offer.. so basically you can sit there and search for things that you have no idea are legal or not..
im sorry i wont waste my time, il just get what i want regardless.
I do like how you can integrate youtorrent into the firefox search thing, im not going to use youtorrent.. but i just wish torrentz or mininova or pirate bay had that.
YouTorrent was cool – ‘was’ being the operative word…
@ 12
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3682
Nice 14, thanks!
for some reason it doesnt work with torrentz.. yeah we are real off topic now.. lol.
If there had been more non-infringing torrent sites from the start, it’s possible that ISPs would not have been so quick to single out bittorrent for bandwidth throttling.
PizzaTorrent is my fav clone..
Baaaah… Don’t even talk about it. They’re bowing down to the man.
They index less than 5% of all public and private torrents now!
Bury this. Oh wait, this isn’t digg. :/
> “If there had been more non-infringing torrent sites from the start, it’s possible that ISPs would not have been so quick to single out bittorrent for bandwidth throttling.”
Why? It’s nothing more than they don’t like people using much of their connection, even though they paid for it. It would be the same if we were all sharing home videos.
i guess legal=nothing good.
couldn’t find anything that i searched for :S
I had a look at this site… It’s pointless, unless you know exactly what your looking for then you can’t really search… defeating the point. the few legal torrents there are are just linux distros.
Why don’t they put category systems in along side?
Looks like an old version of Digg
Yea pizzatorrent.com rules fuck youtorrent!!!!!
@ #18
It isn’t the problem of illegal torrents or how they impact a network (apparently), its the fact that you are using bandwidth that annoys them and their network engineers, who couldnt design a capable network if their lives depended on it. Now that there is far more use for a broadband connection than there used to be, ISP’s not only complain about the so called 95th percentile, they also complain about the legitimate user who uses their connection for on demand streaming. In fact, some are of the opinion that the likes of say the BBC with their iPlayer, should be paying ISP’s for the privilage of allowing their customers to use a service they already pay for. So, if everyone decided tomorrow to start downloading legal torrents, it would change nothing in the eyes of the ISP becuase as far as they are concerned, the problem still exists. Even if it is of their own making.
@1
No *these* guys made their search results look like Google:
http://www.speckly.com
It won’t stop the cartels suing them, and it won’t stop me searching out whatever I want
I have nothing but disrespect and contempt for the big4, as would any sane person in the know.
6 TB ?
Thats about a dozen cheap hard discs.
Not much these days when you’re just a part time pirate …
useless site…
Spent a quick 15 min looking, ur, searching youtorrent.
Useless site without a browse function. They may have some interesting things .. but they are so obscure that you can’t imagine what to search for.
And, BTW, the 6 TB of data thing .. feh. My upload ratio at one tracker is about 10:1, where I’ve DL’d 1.2 TB & uploaded a bit over 11.
6 TB of obscure crapola that might be available is pretty weak.
I disagree with #9.
Its what you search for… If you keep it save (Axxo, FXG, etc), you will end on mininova. But if you search software, cracks, firmware, open source projects and more of that. You wont end up at mininova.
Legal torrent? Thats boring. Where is the phun in a legal BT???
JT
http://www.FireMe.To/udi
It was ok when it started, then it got crappy, now this, it is absolutely useless.
Bye, Bye YouTorrent.
*Policed sites* like these are cancer. Not only are they against the whole freedom of information concept but they give an argument to the anti-tpb ppl that shutting down tpb won’t affect “legal” torrents since they could just move here.
Youtorrent was only in it for the money anyway, they could care less about the P2P movement.
Theres nothing wrong with LEGAL torrents.. but seriously.. every torrent is ‘legal’.. lol, theres nothing ‘illegal’ about them.
People are getting this picture in there head that torrents are piracy only.. and this site doesnt help, it only makes it worst. There should be no such thing as a LEGAL torrent and a ILLEGAL torrent in peoples mind, copyright is the same as prison.. no freedom.
Let the world evolve, every technology to date has been called ‘piracy’, yet look at where we are now. Yes.. someone will have to loose there job or not make as much money.. ITS HOW THE WORLD CHANGES.
What’s with all this talk about caving in and being forced to go legal? I’m pretty sure this was the business plan right from the start. I mean seriously, think about it: searching all the popular torrent sites with a snappy interface was the quickest way to get a huge user base, the losses after transitioning to phase 2 (the intended site as it is now) were expected. It’s just smart marketing, folks.
It was kickass when they started
A very cool search system, bit less torrents but the whole idea was pretty nice
Still preferred Torrentz.com because of the small ammount of torrents, I would come back later
But when i saw this article en did visit YouTorrent it was all crap o.0
That was horrible. No browse, just search. Crappy interface. Unsatisfactory at best.
Good idea but crappy GUI.
Would like to look at the software category but No they said, you can search but what the FuKC do I search for if I don’t know what I am looking for.
The returned results are shite, you do not know what the hell they are or what category them come from.
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
what no browse feature?
Surely the bulk of those “hundreds of thousands of searches a day” are people searching for illegal torrents? I can’t imagine many of them hang around after getting a page full of jazz tunes. What a farce.
This is great news!
The more legal torrent sites we have out there the better. I spoke up in support of this move when it first happened some months ago. Sites like this, and Jamendo and the legal content on Mininova, etc. give musicians, filmmakers, authors and programmers an outlet to release their material for free on a site that doesn’t carry the stigma of piracy.
We need to make a distinction between FREEDOM of information, such as this, and LIBERATION of intellectual property (piracy). As more inherently FREE outlets become available to creators, the need for a liberation front becomes more irrelevant… because we’ve won!
I absolutely do not condemn the liberation of creative works from restrictive corporate copyrights, but to support new systems that foster freedom is a far better option. Ultimately with piracy, although it is an act of rebellion against the corporations, there is alienation between the consumers and the artists and this is not sustainable for our culture over the long time.
Regardless of all this, I probably won’t use YouTorrent. I use free distribution sites (like Jamendo) to find artists new to me that share my views on copyright. YouTorrent does not give me that ability and as such is not terribly useful.
What I meant to say was that YouTorrent does not give me the ability to browse for new music–I need to know what I’m looking for–and this is what makes it not terribly useful.
I said this last time and i’ll say it again – http://www.scrapetorrent.com
Frankly, it’s not really a *torrent* site. I mean they are being a little too legal.
bye bye youtorrent
@#43 (Sheamus)
Every so often someone with a sublime sense of humor posts on here… Kudos. “I can’t imagine many of them hang(ing) around after getting a page full of jazz tunes.”
Now that youtorrent has gone legal, http://btdig.com is the only torrent metasearch engine for me. Didn’t like youtorrent in its prime either though… always got a bunch of irrelevant results. I guess pizzatorrent/nowtorrents are viable options too, but they don’t quite match up to btdig. Just my two cents :)
Whare’s old layout?
I prefer a grid was like a popcorn effect result on screen.
Go back please!!
–
Alexsandro
http://www.alexsandro.com.br
Categories at least.
a la G.O.B. Bluth: “COME On!!!”
Actually I don’t get this idea at all. It’s stupid.
When I come to any torrent-search site, I search for something specific. In 99% of cases it’s not “legal”. And how many torrents in comparison ARE legal out there? I don’t think much.
What am I supposed to do at that site? Check if for some miraculous reason the file I’m searching for have been distributed for free? I don’t need to check – I know it wasn’t.
Just gave it a try: went to games, typed fallout. What did I get? Nothing, zero!
For legal torrenting they should have bothered to make a catalog or something. There is really nothing to search for there.
The idea is stupid, really stupid.
It’s official. YouTorrent SUCKS BIG TIME! The new look it’s a big piece of shit, why did you try to clone google?? And second legal torrents suck too. Congratulations you’ve ruined one of the best sites in the internet. Losers.
Um, to join the choir: my favourite site is btjunkie. I just checked out pizzatorrent.com -> that looks like youtorrent in the time it didn’t suck.
thank
Dini Sohbet
islami Sohbet
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