2009 has been an eventful year for several well-established torrent sites, with The Pirate Bay, isoHunt and Mininova all battling in court against the entertainment industries. For the latter, this legal action has resulted in a partial shutdown of the site, a painful decision after years of loyal service.

Understandably, Mininova’s traffic took a huge hit in the last week which is likely to continue in the months to come. For most other torrent sites, however, 2009 has been a successful year with growing visitor numbers all around.

We have compiled below a list of the 25 most-visited torrent sites as of today. Only public and English language sites are included. The list is based on traffic rank reports from Compete, Alexa and SiteReport’s World Rank. The number of daily visitors and page views are estimates.

#1 THEPIRATEBAY.ORG - Daily Visitors: 4,467,074 - Pageviews: 26,177,054 (5.86 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #104 - Compete Rank: #787 Visit Site | Full Report
#2 TORRENTZ.COM - Daily Visitors: 2,656,483 - Pageviews: 12,963,637 (4.88 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #180 - Compete Rank: Currently Not Available Visit Site | Full Report
#3 ISOHUNT.COM - Daily Visitors: 2,461,643 - Pageviews: 16,566,857 (6.73 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #186 - Compete Rank: #1,226 Visit Site | Full Report
#4 MININOVA.ORG - Daily Visitors: 1,406,653 - Pageviews: 6,597,203 (4.69 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #96 - Compete Rank: #1,123 Visit Site | Full Report
#5 BTJUNKIE.ORG - Daily Visitors: 1,321,113 - Pageviews: 6,143,175 (4.65 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #403 - Compete Rank: #2,286 Visit Site | Full Report
#6 TORRENTREACTOR.NET - Daily Visitors: 898,167 - Pageviews: 1,796,334 (2 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #391 - Compete Rank: #1,500 Visit Site | Full Report
#7 TORRENTDOWNLOADS.NET - Daily Visitors: 888,663 - Pageviews: 1,581,820 (1.78 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,086 - Compete Rank: #3,477 Visit Site | Full Report
#8 MONOVA.ORG - Daily Visitors: 622,539 - Pageviews: 1,512,770 (2.43 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,736 - Compete Rank: #11,068 Visit Site | Full Report
#9 EXTRATORRENT.COM - Daily Visitors: 594,026 - Pageviews: 2,952,309 (4.97 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,199 - Compete Rank: #5,760 Visit Site | Full Report
#10 BTMON.COM - Daily Visitors: 551,256 - Pageviews: 1,025,336 (1.86 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,754 - Compete Rank: #7,009 Visit Site | Full Report
#11 KICKASSTORRENTS.COM - Daily Visitors: 489,477 - Pageviews: 1,830,644 (3.74 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,129 - Compete Rank: #6,178 Visit Site | Full Report
#12 VERTOR.COM - Daily Visitors: 418,194 - Pageviews: 857,298 (2.05 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,365 - Compete Rank: #6,821 Visit Site | Full Report
#13 EZTV.IT - Daily Visitors: 408,690 - Pageviews: 948,161 (2.32 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,751 - Compete Rank: #16,064 Visit Site | Full Report
#14 SUMOTORRENT.COM - Daily Visitors: 384,929 - Pageviews: 869,940 (2.26 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,737 - Compete Rank: #6,039 Visit Site | Full Report
#15 ALIVETORRENTS.COM - Daily Visitors: 361,168 - Pageviews: 664,549 (1.84 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,555 - Compete Rank: #8,391 Visit Site | Full Report
#16 FENOPY.COM - Daily Visitors: 346,911 - Pageviews: 655,662 (1.89 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,494 - Compete Rank: #6,825 Visit Site | Full Report
#17 TORRENTPUMP.COM - Daily Visitors: 342,159 - Pageviews: 1,064,114 (3.11 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,880 - Compete Rank: #10,954 Visit Site | Full Report
#18 TORRENTHOUND.COM - Daily Visitors: 270,876 - Pageviews: 436,110 (1.61 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #3,108 - Compete Rank: #9,589 Visit Site | Full Report
#19 TORRENTPORTAL.COM - Daily Visitors: 266,124 - Pageviews: 548,215 (2.06 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,878 - Compete Rank: #8,045 Visit Site | Full Report
#20 DEMONOID.COM - Daily Visitors: 247,115 - Pageviews: 274,298 (1.11 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #1,728 - Compete Rank: #5,927 Visit Site | Full Report
#21 ZOOZLE.NET - Daily Visitors: 218,601 - Pageviews: 655,803 (3,459 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #3,144 - Compete Rank: #71,461 Visit Site | Full Report
#22 SEEDPEER.COM - Daily Visitors: 218,601 - Pageviews: 375,994 (1.72 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #2,912 - Compete Rank: #7,548 Visit Site | Full Report
#23 TORRENTZAP.COM - Daily Visitors: 194,840 - Pageviews: 490,997 (2.52 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #5,252 - Compete Rank: #22,348 Visit Site | Full Report
#24 YOURBITTORRENT.COM - Daily Visitors: 190,088 - Pageviews: 321,249 (1.69 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #8,541 - Compete Rank: #20,391 Visit Site | Full Report
#25 SEARCH-TORRENT.COM - Daily Visitors: 171,079 - Pageviews: 501,261 (2.93 per visitor) - Alexa Rank: #4,831 - Compete Rank: #132,233 Visit Site | Full Report

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Popularity: 2% [?]

TaffyBox is a torrent search engine that allows its users to download torrents directly through a Java applet in their web browser, instead of a regular BitTorrent client. The idea is not entirely new, as Vertor and a couple of other sites also offer a direct download using Bitlet’s Java applet, but nevertheless the site received a fair share of news coverage after it appeared on TechCrunch.

This level of coverage is a great accomplishment for a new torrent site, but the fun didn’t last very long. Those who took a closer look at the site could easily see that TaffyBox was simply using the resources of another torrent site, BTjunkie, without informing the site’s founder.

Needless to say, the BTjunkie team was not amused when they found out and they responded by preventing TaffyBox from accessing the site’s backend. As a result, the newly launched site no longer functions.

“Sites like TaffyBox drain costly resources without putting into the pot. Most sites that utilize our backend reciprocate and when they don’t we ban them,” the founder of BTjunkie told TorrentFreak. “He just ripped off the site and stripped the ads,” he added.

The disconnection which rendered TaffyBox useless didn’t go unnoticed by Jake who runs the site. Just minutes after BTjunkie disallowed the newcomer from using their resources he offered to link back to BTjunkie, but unfortunately for him that is not enough to earn a reprieve.

BTjunkie’s founder explained to TorrentFreak that those who want to use the search have to link to the site’s download page instead of hotlinking the torrents. “You would think the least he would do is put some reference to BTjunkie, not wait until I cut him off and offer to add one link,” he added.

What happened to TaffyBox is probably a good lesson for all the people that want to use existing torrent indexers to create their own torrent search engine. Sites like BTjunkie don’t see any problems in sharing some of their resources, as long as they get something in return. After all, BitTorrent is all about reciprocity.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Popularity: 2% [?]