Thousands of torrent sites have come and gone over the years but only a handful of large public sites have stood the test of time.

The Pirate Bay is an obvious example but in Russia and surrounding countries, RuTracker is king. This massive torrent site and tracker has endured many storms but has still managed to stay afloat for more than 16 years.

Like all torrent sites, to a great extent, RuTracker relies on its users to seed and share content, whether that’s movies and TV shows or games, music or eBooks. As long as these human parts of the ecosystem play their crucial role in distribution, content should in theory remain available forever. In reality, though, it rarely works that way for long periods of time.

To the detriment of the sites they frequent and other file-sharers, only a small number of BitTorrent users share significantly more data than they take. Fewer still seed for prolonged periods of time. This means that torrents with initially large seed and leech counts can diminish quickly and when the number of seeders on a torrent reaches zero, people hoping to obtain that content have their options severely restricted.

To mitigate this type of problem, a group on RuTracker known as ‘The Guardians / The Keepers’ have been storing huge volumes of content and seeding it to the masses, with a reported focus on older and rare content. In a community post late December, a RuTracker admin revealed that the group had been doing its work for more than 10 years, helping to distribute 1.52 million poorly-seeded torrents referencing around 2,470TB of data, to the tune of 100 to 150TB of transfers per day.

Given that court-ordered blocking is preventing the free flow of regular users into the site to replace those that inevitably leave, RuTracker said that extreme pressure is being placed on The Guardians’ resources, particularly in respect of sheer lack of hard drive space. So, in an effort to boost their output, the site launched a crowdfunding campaign hoping to buy enough new hard drives to store and seed an additional 600 and 800TB of old and rare content.

“First of all, these are distributions that are in low demand by the general public due to their age, narrow focus or volume, but are still of historical and practical value,” the admin explained .

“Specialized software, old versions of software, images of games for now redundant consoles, alternative distributions of media files, etc. If you watch movies, listen to music, download games or software that were released more than a year ago, then each of you may be faced with a situation where there is no way to download the desired distribution due to the lack of distributors. This fundraiser is intended to minimize such incidents.”

After being launched early January, the crowdfunding campaign has now reached its target. According to a report from Meduza , two million rubles (around US$26,870) was raised in just a few weeks, meaning that The Guardians will now get the hard drives they need to ensure that older, rare and historically significant torrents are kept alive.

While the site and its users will be no doubt pleased that their target has been reached quite quickly, it still took weeks to raise a fairly modest amount, something which reflects the general nature of the BitTorrent ecosystem when sharing quotas aren’t enforced.

According to SimilarWeb stats, RuTracker.org receives around 40 million visits per month, yet only a relatively small number of visitors in January contributed to the fundraiser. In the same way, millions of people regularly jump on torrents offered by dozens of trackers, yet only a tiny proportion go the extra mile to make sure content remains available.

BitTorrent is an extremely powerful protocol but without high-levels of human altruism, interventions like this will always be required if niche content isn’t to fall by the wayside.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

The Pirate Bay has had its fair share of troubles over the past year, but it remains the most-visited torrent site.

The main domain continues to draw millions of visitors per day and that’s not taking the numerous proxies and mirrors into consideration.

The yearly list of popular torrent sites is filled with well-known brands. This year there are two newcomers, TorrentGalaxy and Zooqle. These replace Torrentz2 and Tamilrockers, which have both disappeared.

If we have to signal a clear trend, we would point at an overall decrease in the number of popular English-language torrent sites. At the same time, foreign language sites appear to be growing their audience.

For example, sites such as Rutracker.org, Rutor.info, Yggtorrent.si, Etoland.co.kr, Nnnmclub.to, Dytt8.net, and Torrentdia.com are all more popular than the sites at the bottom of our top 10.

Below is the full list of the top ten most-visited (unique) torrent sites at the start of the new year. The list is based on various traffic reports. Please note that this list is created to keep track of the popularity of these sites over time. We do not recommend the use of any of these sites. Some are known to link to malicious ads, at least incidentally.

Top 10 Torrent Sites of 2021

1. The Pirate Bay

After more than 17 years, The Pirate Bay is still going strong. Despite more than a month of downtime in early 2020, the site has kept most of its audience.

The Pirate Bay continues to operate from its .org domain. The site’s registrations remain closed, however, and comments are still disabled.

2. YTS.mx

YTS.mx is the unofficial successor of the defunct YTS or YIFY group, which shut down a few years ago.

YTS has been the target of several lawsuits in the US over the past year, which led to quite a bit of controversy. The operator signed a consent judgment and agreed to hand over user data . As a result, several YTS users received settlement requests or were sued .

3. 1337x

1337x keeps its spot in the top three. Unlike some other sites, it has a loyal group of uploaders that provide fresh content on a daily basis.

1337x offers a wide variety of torrents and also has an official forum that launched last year. The site banned official YTS releases after the above-mentioned controversy.

4. NYAA.si

NYAA.si is a popular resurrection of the anime torrent site NYAA . While there is fierce competition from alternative pirate streaming sites, the torrent portal continues to do well, climbing one position compared to last year.

5. RARBG

RARBG has remained steady over the past year. The site operates from several popular domain names, but only the one with the most traffic is taken into account for this list. RARBG was founded in 2008 and specializes in high-quality video releases.

6. FitGirl Repacks

FitGirl Repacks is by no means a traditional torrent site. It is the home of a popular ‘girl’ who releases slimmed-down cracked versions of popular games, which keeps download times to a minimum.

FitGirl, who we interviewed a few months ago, publishes torrents on other sites too but also offers magnet links of their own, which is why we included the site here.

7. LimeTorrents

LimeTorrents has been around for well over a decade. Like many other entries in this list, it is blocked by ISPs in countries around the world, which seems to hurt overall traffic somewhat.

The site also disappeared from the top rankings of several search engines last year, a fate that’s shared by many other torrent sites in this list.

8. EZTV.re

EZTV.re is a controversial TV-torrent distribution group that hijacked the EZTV brand from the original group, which was forced to shut down soon after.

The group often copies releases from other TV-torrent groups, which occasionally leads to embarrassing situations . The site switched to a new domain a few months ago and currently operates from EZTV.re.

9. TorrentGalaxy

TorrentGalaxy is a relatively new torrent site, which launched little over two years ago. The site has a dedicated group of uploaders and an active community. In addition to torrents, TorrentGalaxy also makes some releases available for streaming.

10. Zooqle

Zooqle, which boasts more than five million verified torrents, returns to the top 10 after a year of absence. The site’s traffic still hasn’t returned to its old levels but it seems to have a dedicated userbase.

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Disclaimer: Proxies and clear copycats are excluded. We know that Alexa isn’t perfect, but it helps to compare sites that operate in a similar niche. We also use other traffic metrics to compile the top ten. Please keep in mind that many sites have mirrors or alternative domains, which are often not taken into account here. The yearly list is published as an informational / news resource.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

At the end of every year, we take a look at the most-downloaded TV-episodes among torrenting pirates.

For several years in a row the list was headed by Game of Thrones but, just like the series itself, this reign has now come to an end.

With the title up for grabs, there were several contenders for the crown. “The Mandalorian” eventually came out as the winner. The popular Disney+ exclusive was previously the third most downloaded TV-series in 2019.

The competition for the top spot was fierce with three titles standing out among the rest. Prime Video’s “The Boys” eventually settled for second place, one spot higher than HBO’s “Westworld.”

The top three nicely shows how fragmented the online entertainment industry has become. In order to watch all three series, one needs three separate subscriptions. That’s a cost not everyone may be able to afford, which can explain part of the piracy problem.

That said, the three TV-shows are first and foremost in this list because they are popular in general and especially with the online audience. That is true both on legal and illegal platforms.

Apart from the changes at the top, it’s notable that there are several newcomers on the list, including “Star Trek: Picard” and “Outsider,” which both premiered in 2020.

It’s worth noting that BitTorrent traffic only makes up a small portion of the piracy landscape. A lot of people use streaming sites and services nowadays, which generally do not report viewing stats.

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Below we have compiled a list of the most torrented TV-shows worldwide (single episode). The ranking is based on several sources, including statistics reported by public BitTorrent trackers. Full season downloads are not included.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more. We have some good VPN deals here for the holidays.

The Pirate Bay’s main .org domain has been unreachable for nearly a day now.

For most people, the site currently displays a CloudFlare error message across the entire site, with the CDN provider mentioning that a “gateway timeout” is causing the issue.

As usual, no further details are available to us and there is no known ETA for the site’s full return. However, judging from past experience, it’s likely a small technical issue that needs fixing.

The Pirate Bay has had quite a few stints of downtime over the years. The popular torrent site usually returns after several hours, but outages of more than a day have occurred as well.

Despite the downtime, there are still some options left for people to access the notorious torrent site.

TPB is still available via its .onion address on the Tor network, accessible using the popular Tor Browser, for example. The site’s Tor traffic goes through a separate server and works just fine. Several dedicated TPB proxies are still up as well.

The Pirate Bay team has a status page in the forums where people can check to see if an outage is affecting everyone or not. This also shows that the Tor version of the site is working fine, and that new torrents are still coming through.

The main .org domain will probably be back in action soon enough, although there are no guarantees. Torrentz2 , for example, disappeared a few weeks ago and still hasn’t returned. The .onion domain remains active but that hasn’t been updated with new content in nearly a week.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

In recent months Denmark has lost two of its most popular pirate sites following police investigations.

Both Danishbit and Nordicbits went offline after the alleged operators were caught . This was a big hit to Danish torrent users, who generally prefer private torrent trackers over public indexers such as The Pirate Bay.

As is often the case with shutdowns, other sites have stepped in to take up the slack. For example, following the closure of Danishbits, both ShareUniversity and Asgaard opened their doors to members who were looking for a new home.

While the people running these sites were initially thrilled, their perspective changed last week when police confirmed their involvement and the arrest of the Danishbits operator. Making matters worse, law enforcement didn’t rule out that users could be identified as well.

Meanwhile, anti-piracy group Rights Alliance increased the pressure on the remaining trackers. The group informed TorrentFreak that they are aware of the growth of these sites and urged them to give up their illegal activities. If not, they would get the same treatment as DanishBits and NordicBits.

This warning wasn’t in vain. Over the past week, the staff of Asgaard considered their options and ultimately decided to throw in the towel.

“We are in a situation where our cozy project has suddenly developed into a LARGE Nordic company. With that in mind, it also made us realize that several of the driving forces behind the site have to take a serious look at their involvement with the project,” staff wrote this week.

The warning from Rights Alliance played an important role in the site’s decision. That, combined with a potential for criminal prosecution of the people involved, proved to be too much pressure.

“The top of the volcano erupts, as the Rights Alliance very descriptively says that they already have an eye on ASGAARD ​​and can see the traffic that has been coming in. In addition, there is the scare campaign about the treatment that awaits us if we choose to continue the project.”

Instead of looking over their shoulders for the years to come, sacrificing sleep and potentially their futures, shutting down is seen as the best option.

“The thought of having to risk the doorbell ringing one day for a visit from the police overshadows the coziness of running this project. We will not expose you to that. Or ourselves. We have therefore chosen to close the ASGAARD project,” Asgaard’s staff concludes.

At the time of writing the site is still online but it will effectively close on December 31. While others may be interested in taking over the site, the Asgaard team prefers a hard stop and will let the domain name go as well.

The tracker operators, who relied on user donations, thank all members for their support and understanding and say they will refund all members who contributed to the site after December 2.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Private BitTorrent trackers are niche sites in most parts of the world but in Denmark they are huge.

With millions of views per month, sites such as ShareUniversity and Asgrd are among the most popular sites in the country.

This was also the case with DanishBits until it suddenly went offline a few weeks ago. At the time, several sources informed us that the owner was arrested and, this week, official confirmation came in that this is indeed the case.

Danishbits Operator Arrested

Denmark’s State Prosecutor for Serious Economic Crime (SØIK) announced that a 33-year-old Danish man was arrested in Morocco. This followed an investigation by the authorities, which acted based on a complaint from local piracy group Rights Alliance.

The Danishbits investigation, which started in 2016, revealed that the site was run professionally and that the people involved did their best to hide their identities. Payments, for example, were made through cryptocurrency.

Despite these efforts, law enforcement officials managed to identify the operator, who was subsequently placed on Interpol’s wanted list. In October, the alleged ringleader of the site was eventually apprehended and jailed in Morocco, from where he will possibly be extradited to Denmark.

“It’s very satisfying that the investigation led to both the arrest of the suspected operator and shutting down the network. It succeeded thanks to the sustained collaboration between our specialized investigators, prosecutors, and IT experts,” says Deputy Police Inspector Michael Lichtenstein.

Nordicbits Shut Down, Operator Passed Away

Danishbits was not the only private tracker to disappear this fall. The same happened to Nordicbits. This site, which was smaller than its competitor, was also reported to the authorities by Rights Alliance in 2018.

After a detailed investigation, the authorities identified a 69-year-old Danish man as the operator. The man, who resided in Spain, was apprehended by local police in September.

After being questioned the Nordicbits operator admitted his involvement in the site and agreed to shut it down voluntarily. The Danish prosecution intended to take the operator to court. However, the man was seriously ill and recently passed away.

Targeting Users?

In both cases, law enforcement officials managed to seize data which will be used for further investigation. Deputy Police Inspector Michael Lichtenstein doesn’t rule out that users will be identified as well.

“The most important thing is clearly to stop the illegal services, but it can certainly not be ruled out that seized data can lead to the identification of the users of the two illegal networks,” he says.

Despite this warning, private torrent trackers continue to flourish in Denmark. The two sites that were shut down had roughly 45,000 registered users, many of whom went to other Danish trackers.

Rights Alliance says that the users of these sites know all too well that they are breaking the law. The anti-piracy group is also happy that the authorities will consider follow-up steps.

“We are pleased that the announcement of the State Prosecutor for Serious Economic Crime also reflects the importance of an increased focus on users’ illegal behavior,” Right Alliance CEO Maria Fredenslund says .

Thus far, however, these users don’t seem to be particularly bothered. After the shutdowns ShareUniversity saw a 500% increase in visits , and Asgrd’s traffic jumped up by more than 750% .

Right Alliance informs TorrentFreak that they are aware of the growth of these sites and urges them to give up their illegal activities. If not, they will get the same treatment as DanishBits and NordicBits.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Without prior warning, Torrentz2 suddenly started to return a ‘ 503 Service Unavailable ‘ error two weeks ago.

From one day to the next millions of regular visitors were left in the cold, effectively disconnected from their gateway to dozens of torrent sites.

Torrentz2 Troubles Continue

After more than two weeks have passed, the situation hasn’t changed. The same error is still present on the side and official mirrors, including Torrentz.pl and Torrentsmirror.com have the same problem.

Since our coverage, we have reached out to the operator multiple times, without any response. This is quite unusual, especially since the emails are being delivered just fine.

This isn’t the first problem Torrentz2 has encountered this year. In June, the official Torrentz2.eu domain name was suspended by the EURid registry, an action that was taken following an order from the Belgian Public Prosecutor in Brussels.

In response, Torrentz2 quickly moved to the .is domain name. The current problems, which are technical in nature, don’t seem to be going away easily.

Torrentz2 .Onion Site Works

Adding to the mystery, we found out that the official onion domain still gives access to the full site. Not just that, the site’s backend is working too as the search engine continues to be updated with fresh links.

The domain ‘torrentzwealmisr.onion’ wasn’t promoted on the Torrentz2 site over the past months but during the years before it was prominently listed on the site’s footer. So it’s certainly not a copycat.

Through the .onion address people can still access Torrentz2 over the anonymous Tor-network , with the Tor browser for example. In addition, it’s possible to access it through regular browsers by adding .ly to the .onion domain.

Good News?

Avid Torrentz2 users may welcome this news but it’s unknown whether this is really positive.

There is clearly something ‘broken’ at the main site. In addition, the lack of communication and action from the operator is troubling. Yes, the onion domain works, but for how long?

The problems at Torrentz2 are not just affecting the site’s operator and users, third-party torrent sites are also feeling it too. Some smaller torrent sites received a lot of traffic from the meta-search engine. That traffic is now missing.

For now, it appears that the uncertainty around Torrentz2’s future will continue. We will keep an eye on the situation and if there’s any news we’ll report on it in due course.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

With millions of regular visitors, Torrentz2 is without a doubt the most popular torrent meta-search engine on the Internet.

Update December 4: Torrentz2.is remains down after a week. The 503 error is still the only thing that’s showing up. We repeatedly reached out to the operator without any response. This suggests that there may be more going on than a DDoS attack. When we know more we will write a new article. All proxies, mirrors, or alternatives that are online are unofficial.

The site took this spot from the original Torrentz site, which shut down unexpectedly during the summer of 2016.

Since then, not much has changed. The site has continued to operate quietly like its predecessor by indexing and linking to dozens of millions of links on external torrent sites.

Torrentz2’s Domain Issues

Earlier this year the site suffered a major setback. In June, the official Torrentz2.eu domain name was suspended by the EURid registry, an action that was taken following an order from the Belgian Public Prosecutor in Brussels .

Torrentz2 swiftly responded and moved to Torrentz2.is, while adding several backup domains such as Torrentz.pl and Torrentsmirror.com. While these domains still work fine, they also show the same error.

503 Service Unavailable

For more than a day, Torrentz2 has been returning a “503 Service Unavailable” error, as shown in the screenshot below.

“503 Service Unavailable” is an HTTP status code that typically indicates that the server of a website is overloaded. This is often a temporary issue but, in this case, it’s taking unusually long.

TorrentFreak reached out to the operator of Torrentz2 to ask whether the problem will be resolved in the near future, but we have yet to hear back.

Without an official comment, we can only speculate as to the reason for the ‘downtime’. It seems likely, however, that it is of a technical nature. That could include DDoS attacks, which are not uncommon for torrent sites.

Torrentz2 uses Cloudflare, which generally protects servers from DDoS attacks. However, if attackers know the origin IP-address, they can bypass that protection layer.

There doesn’t appear to be a connection to the domain issues from earlier this year, which appeared to be linked to Hollywood. Torrentz2’s main .is domain, which is managed by Iceland’s ISNIC registry, is functioning properly.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

In recent years, YTS.mx has become one of the most-used torrent sites, serving millions of visitors every day.

The site can be used without registering an account. However, those who sign up get some extra features, such as an option to bookmark titles. These added benefits can be handy but we learned that having an account also comes with risks.

Movie Companies Target YTS Users

In recent months, a group of movie companies filed several lawsuits against alleged YTS users . In several of these cases, they relied on information that came directly from the YTS user database , including email addresses and download histories.

The information was shared by the YTS operator as part of a confidential settlement agreement. This revelation came as a shock to the affected users and was harshly criticized by other torrent sites, several of which decided to ban YTS torrents .

Pirate Release Warns Downloaders

Today, we can add another episode to this unfolding drama after a torrent for the documentary “ Rise of the Trolls ” appeared online with the addition of a rather unusual message. Roughly three minutes into the video, the following warning appears.

“If you have downloaded this from either YTS or Extratorrent you can expect problems with the authorities. They cooperate with the film industry, more information can be found on Torrentfreak,” it reads.

The shorturl suggests that the link might point to more information but when we tried to access it this morning it redirected to the shorturl homepage. However, we assume that it’s supposed to provide more detail on the YTS database sharing issue.

The torrent, shared by SimplyTheBOSS, was uploaded to various torrent sites and copied by even more. This includes the popular ‘ExtraTorrent’ site extratorrents.it, that was formerly operating as Extratorrent.ag.

This, understandably, raised questions among the site’s users as the comment below illustrates.

TorrentFreak wasn’t in any way involved or consulted on the matter and the warning itself deserves some nuance.

Nuance Required

ExtraTorrent has frequently been linked to YTS and some believe that it is operated by the same ‘group’ of people. However, we’re not aware of any ExtraTorrent database info that was shared with film companies. Such information hasn’t been brought up in lawsuits either.

Also, the warning in the video references problems with the authorities. This is not necessarily the case as the YTS-related lawsuits are all civil cases between film companies and the alleged pirates. There is no law enforcement agency involved, yet.

The warning is correct by stating that YTS cooperated with film companies but whether they still share database information is unknown. We previously learned that it was a one-time arrangement, but details about the ‘deal’ were never officially made public.

That said, many people have lost trust in the site, no matter what happens in the future, and this warning notice underlines that.

The Troll Threat

To find out more, TorrentFreak reached out to the uploader of one of the torrents but he or she preferred not to comment publicly on the matter. The same warning may also appear in other releases, but we have only seen it in the “Ride of the Trolls” torrent so far.

The makers of the documentary have nothing to do with the lawsuits but their title was likely chosen for a reason. The film companies that go after individual pirates are often referred to as “copyright trolls,” after all. Also, the documentary discusses topics such as online anonymity and freedom on the internet.

Finally, it is worth noting that anyone who downloads content via BitTorrent can potentially be tracked, no matter what site they use. Without a VPN, one’s public IP-address is visible to anyone, including copyright holders.

The YTS database information gave filmmakers extra evidence though. They used this in various lawsuits but also sent settlement offers to YTS users directly , using the listed email address.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.