YouTorrent

» see youtorrent.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In April 2008 a torrent search engine claiming ten million visitors a month took away the thing people came for. YouTorrent stopped searching the general BitTorrent sites and kept only sources carrying licensed files. It lost more than half its traffic. The reason its operator gave was that results coming back from some of those engines were of uncertain origin and accuracy, and that the project did not fit the core business of the company that owned it.

Before that it had been a good idea built quickly. It launched in December 2007 and ran searches across several torrent sites at once, laying the results side by side so you could see which tracker had the most seeds without opening five tabs. TorrentFreak reviewed it on 4 January 2008. TechCrunch got there two weeks later under a headline telling readers to try it before it got shut down.

Nobody ever did shut it down. It was put up for sale in April 2008 and the sale fell through. In July it relaunched as a legal-only search with 67,170 torrents indexed from licensed sources like Jamendo and Vuze. There were no ads on it and it made no money. Traffic steadied at the lower level and was reported to be growing again, and the site carried on for another five years as a search engine for torrents nobody was looking for.

Torrents were how a lot of things arrived in 2008, for me and for everyone else with a line fast enough to leave running overnight and the patience to sit on a slow swarm. The thing that made YouTorrent worth a bookmark was that it searched five sites at once. After April 2008 it searched the ones nobody used.

~ the dossier ~

~ going legal ~

TorrentFreak and TechCrunch both reported the decision on 13 April 2008. TechCrunch called it an odd move that might well kill the site's traffic, which it did. A later TorrentFreak piece said the change had followed legal threats without saying whose, and no rights holder or trade body is named anywhere in the record. The operator was known publicly only as Patrick, and that is as far as the paper trail on the people goes.

~ the clowdy switch ~

Wikipedia gives 4 April 2013 as the shutdown date and cites nothing for it. The archive is more honest about the edges of this. On 1 April 2013 youtorrent.com was still serving the legal search, 7,128 bytes of it, under a title that read Your Torrents, Our Legal Downloads. On 1 May the same address answered with 2,268 bytes introducing a new product called Clowdy, a place to discover and share carefully crafted content. The switch happened inside that month and nobody wrote the day down.

~ the for sale page ~

By July 2018 the domain served a single sentence saying YouTorrent no longer exists and suggesting you try twine.fm to hire creative freelancers. Today it blocks a plain request with a 403 and serves a browser about 14 KB of broker listing instead. A domain brokerage called Saw.com is handling the sale.

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