YouTorrent Goes Legal, and Up For Sale
Written by Ernesto on April 13, 2008In just a matter of weeks since its launch, YouTorrent has become one of the most popular BitTorrent meta-search engines. This weekend, however, it revealed a shift in strategy and it now only indexes sites that host torrent files linking to “licensed” content.
Unsurprisingly, the enormous success of the site even inspired others to start similar projects. None of these came close to YouTorrent’s success, which now attracts over 10 million unique visitors a month.
YouTorrent’s selling points are the great interface, an ad-less design, and its ability to search most of the bigger BitTorrent sites. The latter has changed though, and this might very well be the end of YouTorrent’s popularity.
Patrick, one of the people running YouTorrent told TorrentFreak: “Due to the uncertain nature of the source and accuracy of the results returned by some engines, we have decided to reduce our engine selection to ones that claim the provision of licensed, certified content.”
It doesn’t stop there. YouTorrent is not only going ‘legal’, but Patrick is also looking into selling the site. “The YouTorrent project has grown very quickly and unfortunately is not in line with the owning companies core business,” Patrick said.
“We have had some interest [to buy] from some parties. On that basis, we have presented the site to other parties in the space to see if there is interest there also,” he added.
It is unfortunate to see that YouTorrent has to throw in the towel only 4 months after it launched. One thing is clear, they haven’t made any money so far, since there weren’t any ads on the site. Selling the site could make the YouTorrent team quite a few bucks though, it almost looks like this was the plan anyway.
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122 Responses
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fair do’s.
if i had that sort of traffic coming to a domain i’d cash in for sure.
pizzatorrent is a better equivalent anyway
Go YouTorrent =D
Woop Woop First
x
nice nice i love it … cheers from south america
It does look like they planned it like this from the start. Not having ads and gunning for increasing page views isn’t sustainable.
Must have been pretty expensive for them to run it with that amount of traffic.. Wonder where the cash has come from..
YouTorrents peer stats were always complete bollocks. I seriously doubt they will be getting 10 million vistors by hosting legit torrents though. Kudos to them for going down the legit path, no doubt there will be the fair share of comments from the haters and freetards for whom the idea of a legal torrent is somewhat alien.
Good bye & Good luck! :-)
Yawn. Legal torrents bore me.
this is just bad, lame i say. use ads and get going again.
funnily enough i tried to use it earlier.
And i thought we have they taken all the decent sites out and made it shit????
I’ll buy it for a fiver.
This is one hell of a stunt YouTorrent has pulled on the community. I personally hope no one buys the site and they loose every penny they’ve put into it.
YouTorrent is baloney. They offer like 5-6 torrent sites. I rather use Pizzatorrent and Torrentz, they are much better…and of course, no ads with AdBlock :)
*pop*
Are there “illegal torrents in your contry? Geez
Sounds like a smart business move. Having a popular interface that indexes only legal torrents will certainly encourage publishers to use BT as a distribution method. There are some drawbacks to publishing legit content on sites otherwise associated with piracy and this might be the fix.
[quote comment="344088"]Go YouTorrent =D
Woop Woop First
x[/quote]
Dimbulb…
(P.S. Buhbye, youtorrent.com)
[quote comment="344171"]YouTorrent is baloney. They offer like 5-6 torrent sites. I rather use Pizzatorrent and Torrentz, they are much better…and of course, no ads with AdBlock :)[/quote]
Actually they _used_ to offer more. They had an option to add or remove more predefined trackers, including torrentz.
[quote comment="344171"]YouTorrent is baloney. They offer like 5-6 torrent sites. I rather use Pizzatorrent and Torrentz, they are much better…and of course, no ads with AdBlock :)[/quote]
Actually they _used_ to offer more. They had an option to add or remove more predefined trackers, including torrentz.
never even heard of it
i hope the dosent get brought by some random compnay that inserts annoying popups and shit cause that would sux
there you go, youtorrent, gone from my bookmarks.
Pizzatorrent seems to be a better alternative.
Im going to check out other search sites.. I noticed the reduction last night (in trackers)…
[quote comment="344214"]Sounds like a smart business move. Having a popular interface that indexes only legal torrents will certainly encourage publishers to use BT as a distribution method. There are some drawbacks to publishing legit content on sites otherwise associated with piracy and this might be the fix.[/quote]
Sounds like a idiotic business move for anyone who purchases the site for anything more than what the domain name is worth.
THIS IS A CLASSIC BAIT AND SWITCH
YouTorrent SUX! There business plan, pertaining to their site users, reads as follows: “Find’em, F@ck’em, Forget’em!”
Deleted from my bookmarks also!
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