Continuing a long-standing New Year’s tradition, today we present an
up-to-date list of the world’s most-visited BitTorrent sites. At the
start of 2014 The Pirate Bay continues to pull in the most visitors,
followed by KickassTorrents and Torrentz. Household name isoHunt.com
disappears after settling with the MPAA, but its replacement isoHunt.to
is one of this year's newcomers.
With 2013 now behind us, which torrent sites are pulling in the most visitors at the start of 2014?
Traditionally, BitTorrent users are very loyal, which is reflected in
the top 10 where most sites have had a consistent listing for more than
half a decade. But in common with every year, 2014 sees a few movers
and shakers, as well as several newcomers.
The top three slots remain intact compared to last year, with The Pirate Bay in the lead despite several domain name changes.
The most notable absentee this year is isoHunt. The site has been
featured in the top 10 since 2006, but went offline in 2013 after it
settled its legal dispute with the MPAA for $110 million.
Last year’s newcomer
H33t also fell out of the top 10 after it lost its domain name. The site relaunched
after two months downtime at
H33t.to but has lost most of its traffic.
The first newcomer in the top 10 this year is YIFY-Torrents, which is
also one of the youngest torrent sites after being founded in 2011. The
site has grown tremendously over recent months, and by focusing on
popular movie releases YIFY has evolved into
Hollywood’s new nemesis.
Isohunt clone/replacement
isoHunt.to is the second newcomer, which is quite an achievement since
the site only launched two months ago. RARBG is the last ‘new’ name, the
site has been around for many years but is listed in the top 10 for the
first time.
Below is the full list of the top 10 most-visited torrent sites at
the start of the new year. Only public and English language content
sites are included. The list is based on various traffic reports and we
display the Alexa and U.S. Compete rank for each. In addition, we
include last year’s ranking for each of the 10 sites.
Did we miss anything? Feel free to join the discussion below. People who want to increase their privacy may wants to use a
proxy or VPN service.
To many people The Pirate Bay is synonymous with BitTorrent. The site
was founded more than a decade ago and is still expanding, despite
various legal troubles, domain hops and ISP blockades. The Pirate Bay
currently has well over a billion page views a month.
Alexa Rank: 79 (est) / Compete Rank: NA / Last year #1
KickassTorrents was founded in 2009 and has quickly moved up in our
top 10, settling into 2nd position this year. Responding to a looming
domain seizure the site
moved
from its kat.ph domain to Kickass.to last August. Despite domain
troubles and blockades by Internet providers in the UK and Italy, the
site continues to grow.
Alexa Rank: 103 / Compete Rank: 452 / Last year #2
Torrentz has been the leading BitTorrent meta-search engine for many
years. Unlike the other sites featured in the list Torrentz does not
host any torrent files, it merely redirects visitors to other places on
the web. The site uses several domain names with .eu being the most
popular.
Alexa Rank: 153 / Compete Rank: 1.377 / Last year #3
ExtraTorrent continues to gain more traffic and has moved up again in
the top 10, now placed as the 4th most-visited torrent site. This
success didn’t go unnoticed by rightsholders groups such as the
MPAA
who recently called out ExtraTorrent as one of the top pirate sites.
The site was forced to trade in its .com domain for .cc this year, after
it was
suspended by its domain registrar.
Alexa Rank: 363 / Compete Rank: 2,286 / Last year #5
Roughly three years ago nobody had ever heard of YIFY but today the
movie release group is one of the most recognizable movie piracy brands
on the Internet. This reputation resulted in a court-ordered
ISP blockade in the UK last year.
Alexa Rank: 809 / Compete Rank: 6,245 / Last year #NA
Unlike the other sites in the top 10, TV-torrent distribution group
EZTV is a niche site specializing in TV content only. Because of its
focus, EZTV’s traffic varies in line with the TV seasons.
Alexa Rank: 1,050 / Compete Rank: 10,790 / Last year #7
1337x focuses more on the community aspect than some competitors. The
site’s owners say they launched 1337x to “fill an apparent void where
it seemed there was a lack of quality conscience ad free torrent sites
with public trackers.” In common with most other sites in the top 10,
1337x.org is currently blocked by the larger UK Internet providers.
Alexa Rank: 1,382 / Compete Rank: 11,445 / Last year #6
Isohunt.to
was launched
last October, less than two weeks after isoHunt.com shut down. The site
is not affiliated with the old isoHunt crew but copied the site’s
design. This has not been without success, as the site now has millions
of pageviews a day.
Alexa Rank: 1,550 / Compete Rank: NA / Last year #NA
BitSnoop is one of the largest BitTorrent indexes, claiming to index a
massive 21,437,061 torrent files at the time of writing. The site’s
torrents list continues to grow steadily, as do the number of
DMCA notices that it receives.
Alexa Rank: 1,714 / Compete Rank: 5,633 / Last year #8
RARBG, which started out as a Bulgarian tracker several years ago, is
the third newcomer in the top 10. Together with isoHunt.to it is the
only website in the list that hasn’t been blocked in the UK, which may
in part explain its popularity.
Alexa Rank: 1,867 / Compete Rank: 13,238 / Last year #NA
Disclaimer: Yes, we know that Alexa isn’t perfect and that
Compete has plenty of flaws, but combined both do a pretty good job at
comparing sites that operate in a similar niche. The Alexa rank for The
Pirate Bay is estimated based on the ranking of the .sx domain and
isoHunt’s Alexa ranking is based on the past month only.
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