So here we are, a compiled list of the 10 most-visited torrent sites at the start of the new year.
1. The Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay (commonly abbreviated TPB) is a Swedish website that hosts magnet links, which allow users to share electronic files, including music, computer games and software, via BitTorrent. The Pirate Bay bills itself as "The world's most resilient BitTorrent site" (as of 2012, "The galaxy's most resilient...") The Pirate Bay is currently ranked as the 78th most visited website in the world and 20th in Sweden by Alexa Internet, has over 5.5 million registered users and, as of February 2012, hosts more than 4 million torrent files. According to the Los Angeles Times, The Pirate Bay is "one of the world's largest facilitators of illegal downloading" and "the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright or pro-piracy movement".
2. Torrentz
Torrentz is a Finland-based[2] meta-search engine for BitTorrent that is run by an individual known as Flippy. It indexes torrents from various major torrent sites such as yourBittorrent and offers compilations of various trackers per torrent that are not necessarily present in the default .torrent file, so that when a tracker is down, other trackers can do the work. It was the second most popular torrent website after The Pirate Bay in 2010[3], and it currently has a traffic rank of 145 on Alexa.
3. KickassTorrents
Founded in 2009, KickassTorrents is one of the youngest sites in the list, and this year it moved up to the top 3. Responding to the increasing worries about domain seizures, the site moved from its kickasstorrents.com domain to kat.ph a few months ago. The site continues to innovate and release new features every other week, and it currently ranks 257 on Alexa.
4. IsoHunt
IsoHunt is a BitTorrent index with over 1.7 million torrents in its database and 20 million peers from indexed torrents. With 7.4 million unique visitors as of May 2006, isoHunt is one of the most popular BitTorrent search engines. Thousands of torrents are added to and deleted from it every day. Users of isoHunt perform over 40 million unique searches per month. On October 19, 2008, isoHunt passed the 1 petabyte mark for torrents indexed globally. The site is the third most popular BitTorrent site as of 2008. According to isoHunt, the total amount of shared content was more than 13.44 petabytes as of September 29, 2011.
5. BTjunkie
BTJunkie was a BitTorrent search engine operating between 2005 and 2012. It used a web crawler (similar to Google) to search for torrent files from other torrent sites and store them on its database. It had nearly 4,000,000 active torrents and about 4,200 torrents added daily (compared to runner-up Torrent Portal with 1,500), making it the largest torrent site indexer on the web. During 2011, BTJunkie was the 5th most popular BitTorrent site.
6. ExtraTorrent
ExtraTorrent is one of those robust torrent indexes that doesn’t make the news very often. Compared to last year the site has moved up a spot and is now the 6th most popular torrent venue.
7. Demonoid
Demonoid is a website and BitTorrent tracker created by an anonymous programmer (supposedly of Serbian origin) known only by the pseudonyms "Deimos" and "Zajson". The website indexes torrents uploaded by its members. Demonoid.com was ranked the 538th most popular website overall in December 2010, according to Alexa. Demonoid's torrent tracker had an estimated three million peers in September 2007. The site had over 252,427 torrents indexed as of May 3, 2009 (torrents uploaded prior to August 4, 2005 were removed to free server resources).
8. EZTV
Unlike the other sites in the top 10, TV-torrent distribution group EZTV is a niche site specializing in TV content only. Despite its fair share of downtime this year, EZTV has managed to get a spot in the top 10 for the first time in its six year existence.
9. Bitsnoop
BitSnoop is another newcomer that gained a large audience this year. This didn’t go unnoticed by the RIAA, who filed a complaint at the U.S. District Court of Columbia and obtained a subpoena to reveal the identity of BitSnoop’s owner a few months ago.
10. 1337x
1337x is also new to the top 10, and focuses more on the community aspect than some competitors. The site’s owners say they started 1337x to “fill an apparent void where it seemed there was a lack of quality conscience ad free torrent sites with public trackers.” Its 10th place this year proves that they’re getting the success formula right.