ExtraTorrent

» see extratorrent.cc as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

extratorrent was the fallback. when kickasstorrents did not have the exact release i wanted, the next tab was usually extratorrent. it had a smaller community and a slightly noisier comment section, the index itself was deep and the upload velocity was high enough that a tv episode would show up there within an hour of airing in the us. for someone watching us shows from ttnet adsl in ankara in the early 2010s, that hour-of-airing window mattered.

the site launched in november 2006 under an operator using the alias SaM. for the first few years it was just another mid-tier index. extratorrent's slow climb happened during the years that the bigger indexes were getting raided one by one. when demonoid went dark in 2012, when isohunt lost its us court case in 2013, when kickasstorrents was seized in july 2016, extratorrent absorbed traffic each time. by 2017 it was ranked the 291st most-viewed site on the public internet.

none of that traffic was enough to make the operator feel safe. extratorrent had never been raided, never been served, never been sued in a us court. that did not turn out to be relevant.

~ the case file ~

~ the actual end ~

on 17 may 2017 the homepage was replaced with a short message saying extratorrent had shut down permanently. the operator wiped the database. clones started appearing within hours, the most popular one was extratorrent.cd, which turned out to be a reskinned pirate bay frontend rather than a real extratorrent revival. the message specifically warned users not to trust mirror sites because the real database was gone.

the operator never explained the decision in detail. the timing pointed to one obvious factor: the kickasstorrents seizure ten months earlier had put the us doj on a list of indexer operators specifically, with apple and facebook subpoenas cross-referenced into ip-address evidence chains. SaM was looking at the kickasstorrents indictment as a forecast of what a us-led prosecution against a torrent indexer looked like in 2017, and chose the same exit btjunkie had taken in 2012 after the megaupload raid. wipe the database and take the site down before anyone arrives with a warrant.

~ what got buried with it ~

the extratorrent database was substantial. years of torrent files, magnet links, comment threads, user ratings, all of it gone in a single decision. there was no archive operation, no community-side dump, no anonymous transfer to another indexer. the operator had run the site solo for over a decade and chose to end it the same way.

torrent traffic after may 2017 redistributed to the surviving indexes. 1337x absorbed a lot of it. the pirate bay continued its long resurrection cycle on different domains. rarbg held a portion until its own 2023 shutdown. by 2026 the top of the torrent index list looks nothing like it did in 2015, the operator-anonymous solo-run model that defined extratorrent and btjunkie is mostly gone, replaced by indexer collectives with distributed infrastructure. the quietest exits of the torrent era turned out to be the ones that worked.

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