The popularity of BitTorrent is growing every day. BitTorrent sites are on the rise, and now four of them hold positions in the top 500 most popular websites on the Internet. Even more are expected to join the club in the near future.

Back in 2004, Suprnova managed to settle itself among the 1000 most visited websites on the internet. So when the site was taken offline december 19, 2004, there was a huge gap to fill. Today, 6 BitTorrent sites entered this top 1000 list, generating more traffic than Suprnova ever did.

Sites in Alexa’s Top 1000 (rank September 26, 2006)

205 Mininova

218 Torrentspy

387 The Piratebay

439 Isohunt

573 Torrentz

593 Demonoid

Top 4

As you can see, there are now four BitTorrent sites in the top 500 of the most visited websites on the internet. Torrentspy and Mininova are currently 218 and 205. The Piratebay and Isohunt follow in 387 and 439 respectively.

Upcoming Sites

It doesn’t stop here. There are more sites waiting in line to enter the top 500. Currently Torrentz and Demonoid both entered the 1000 most visited sites on the internet. Both sites are rapidly growing as you can see in the graph below. They climbed from a spot somewhere around the 5000 to the top 1000 in only 6 months.

From Zero to Hero

One could argue that with al these popular sites, there is no room for new BitTorrent sites to grow. However, the opposite is true. New sites are being launched every day. Fenopy and Btmon are great examples of torrent sites that attracted quite a lot of traffic over a relatively short period of time.

Fenopy launched this June, and Btmon in August. Both sites made it to the top 10.000 in no time. Today Fenopy’s traffic rank is 7,914, and Btmon is ranked 3,380.

Another site that has been faring well lately is the recently resurrected Snarf-It. Snarf-It went from a relatively low traffic rank in July to 5000 earlier this month. Unfortunately they have some server issues at the moment, otherwise they would have climbed even higher.

And Next

So what’s next? Well I predict that by the end of this year we will see at least 10 BitTorrent sites in the top 1000. If you look at the graph of the four most visited BitTorrent sites you may notice that their traffic stabilized since May. I don’t expect that Mininova or Torrentspy will enter the top 100, but you never know.

Note: Alexa’s data gathering is quite dubious. The exact figures may be not be completely accurate, but it is a great tool (especially the traffic rank) to compare sites within the same niche and to get a global impression of traffic shifts over time.