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
55 Responses
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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!!!!!
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