Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2007

[lipripr]

Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2007
Written by Ernesto on December 29, 2007

2007 is almost over so it’s time to make a list of the Top 10 “public” BitTorrent sites getting the most traffic this year. Mininova is out in the lead followed by IsoHunt and The Pirate Bay. TorrentSpy, the most popular BitTorrent site last year, has dropped down to 6th place.

The list is based on Alexa’s traffic rank, and this data was backed up by reports from quantified sites on quantcast and traffic reports from some of the site admins.

Here is the list, as of December 29, public BitTorrent sites only.
1. Mininova

Without a doubt the most visited BitTorrent site. In November, Mininova reached a milestone by entering the list of the 50 most visited websites on the Internet.

Alexa rank: 46
2. IsoHunt

IsoHunt continued to grow this year. In September they were forced to close their trackers to US traffic because of the issues they have with the MPAA, but this had no effect on the visitor count.

Alexa rank: 143
3. The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay has been in the news quite a bit this year and remains not only the most used BitTorrent tracker, but also one of the most visited BitTorrent sites. At the moment they are fighting with IsoHunt for the second place in this list.

Alexa rank: 147
4. Torrentz

Torrentz is the only “torrent site” in the top 10 that doesn’t host .torrent files. Several improvements and new features have been introduced over the past year such as a comment system, private bookmarks and a cleaner layout.

Alexa rank: 160
5. BTjunkie

BTjunkie was one of the fastest risers last year and continued to grow throughout 2007. Last month they were, like many others, forced to leave their ISP (LeaseWeb), but the transition to a new host went smoothly and didn’t result in any downtime.

Alexa rank: 445
6. TorrentSpy

TorrentSpy was the most popular BitTorrent site of 2006, but dropped to sixth place due to legal issues with the MPAA. To ensure the privacy of their users, TorrentSpy decided that it was best to block access to all users from the US, causing their traffic to plunge.

Alexa rank: 461
7. TorrentPortal

Not much news about TorrentPortal this year, but that probably is a good thing. Like most other sites they have grown quite a bit in 2007.

Alexa rank: 481
8. GamesTorrents

It’s quite a surprise to see GamesTorrents in the list of 10 most popular BitTorrent sites of 2007. This Spanish BitTorrent site had a huge dip in traffic earlier this year but managed to secure 8th place.

Alexa rank: 583
9. TorrentReactor

TorrentReactor.net has been around for quite a while, four years to be exact, and is still growing.

Alexa rank: 604
10. BTmon

BTmon was one of the newcomers in 2006, and it is the youngest BitTorrent site in the top 10 this year.

Alexa rank: 673
Honorable Mention: Demonoid

For being one of the most visited BitTorrent sites until they pulled the plug in November.


Top 5 Newcomers
1. SumoTorrent

SumoTorrent launched this April and quickly became one of the more popular BitTorrent sites.

Alexa rank: 1021
2. SeedPeer

SeedPeer launched in September and is formerly known as Meganova.

Alexa rank: 2924
3. Zoozle

A BitTorrent meta-search engine, launched in January.

Alexa rank: 2987
4. Extratorrent

Launched a year ago, it got a serious traffic boost earlier this year.

Alexa rank: 5304
5. BitTorrent.am

BitTorrent.am is also indexed by Torrentz.com, and was launched early 2007.

Alexa rank: 6903

Note: Alexa’s data gathering is not perfect. The exact figures may be not be completely accurate, but it is a great tool (especially the traffic rank) to compare sites within the same niche and to get a global impression of traffic shifts over time.

[Hazzard]

thanks for the list and info

[drbits]

Time to update a little.
The most popular Torrent search sites are about the same, except that I think Google is now up to #2.

You have to distinguish between Torrent sites (Trackers) and Torrent Search Sites. The only trackers you mention are Demonoid and Mininova. The most popular site as both a tracker and a search site in the first half of 2009 was ThePirateBay. However, they have had legal problems and are only a search site now.

I haven't done the Alexa ratings. TorrentKing.org tracks number of hits (which is close to Alexa ratings in order). The current top sites are

Zionteam.org 162888 hits (private general tracker)
Scenehd.org 158598 hits (private HD TV and Movies tracker)
Btjunkie.org 102125 hits (public general index)
Puretna.com 78114 hits (private porn tracker)
Sexybits.net 64776 hits (private porn tracker)
Nordic-T.org 63517 hits (private General tracker)
FileList.org 63466 hits (private General tracker)
ThePirateBay.org 57845 hits (Now a public general index)
TorrentBytes.net 56011 hits (private General tracker)
Hdbits.org 53850 hits (private HD TV and Movies tracker)
Deviloid.net 47703 hits (private porn tracker)
Scenefz.net 45619 hits (private General tracker)
Bitme.org 44717 hits (private e-learning tracker)
Porntorrents.ws 44500 hits (private porn tracker)

This gives you an idea about how things have changed. As BT has matured, more people are joining private trackers. The general index sites are still important (and the same ones are important), but they miss most private trackers.

TorrentKing.org will allow you to search for specific types of sites in specific languages (my Romanian isn't very good).


(http://www.torrentking.org/tracker_details/1137.html) (http://www.torrentking.org/tracker_details/1137.html)

[farrell]

please look at the date, this was from 2007

[iamsorry]

i thought the general conscensus is not to use torrents nowadays?

[eyesonyouu]

i thought the general conscensus is not to use torrents nowadays?

Depends upon which country you stay and what laws it have! :D

[drbits]

Torrents have a huge user base. Some private sites have over 50K users and around 5K visitors per day. The advantage of Torrents is that there are a group of known "Scene" posters who are trusted by the site staff. Other material is either deleted or carefully scrutinized. The format of the posts is usually standardized on each site.

A Torrent is a collection of files defined by a .torrent file, much like a .dlc file. There are several other file sharing standards that are similar. They break up the set of files into small pieces (16KB for torrents) and users download and upload to each other in these small pieces. The problem is that there is a server (tracker) that is required to provide the exchange of information about who has what pieces. Technically, trackers aren't illegal in most countries (they don't contain any of the files, just information about who has them), but they keep getting sued for facilitating file sharing.

Some of the standards (like e-donkey) are server-less. One downloads a list of nearby users, and exchanges information with them. This went out of fashion, because torrent sites provide a social aspect, much like this site. A couple of newer standards are being Beta tested that are like e-donkey, but users don't know what is in their sharing partition. Thus, everybody has denyability. It would be like this site, except that instead of host addresses, one would post hash codes for the files in a DLC. The software would find neighbors who had parts of the file either in their visible sharing partition or blind cache. The blind cache only contains pieces of files, not whole files, and their contents are balanced automatically.

If you look around, you will find 0-day packs. These are packages that contain all of the "Scene" releases for a day. They are usually collections of torrents, with NFO (description) files and Poster (image files) to go with each one.

Sorry about the length. Until recently, I was an administrator on a Torrent site. The hardest part of running a private Torrent site is making sure that people make their files available to others (called seeding). Here the files are available on Hosts, which partly gets around the problem. Distributed systems with blind caches make those file parts available any time the computer is hooked up to the internet.

The reason that file sharing is such a big issue in some countries is because corporations bribe government officials to pass laws or perform other acts on their behalf. Most of these corporations are very short-sited (most corporations in the USA have detailed plans only for the next 3 months, with little attention to long term goals).

[upnorth]

please look at the date, this was from 2007
http://i33.tinypic.com/dln5w7.jpg
:))

/UpNorth