Torrent Icon ExtraTorrent Turns Ten Years old Today

ExtraTorrent, one of the largest torrent sites on the Internet, celebrates its tenth anniversary today. The site has come a long way since it first launched a decade ago. With its own distribution groups and a very active community, the site has evolved into a torrent icon.

On November 15, 2006, a new torrent site was unveiled to the public.

At a time when sites such as TorrentSpy and Mininova were dominating the landscape, ExtraTorrent was determined to grow an audience of its own.

Today, exactly ten years later, most of the former torrent giants have fallen. However, ExtraTorrent is still around and with millions of pageviews per day it’s one of the largest torrent sites around.

The rise of ExtraTorrent is in part the result of a very active community. This includes the many users who casually chat in the forums, as well as a dedicated team of moderators and staff who keep the site clean of fake files and spam.

What’s truly unique, however, is that ExtraTorrent is much more than just an index of torrent sites. The site is also the home of several distribution groups that carry the site’s name.

ETRG, ETTV, and ETHD are familiar names for many passionate torrent users. The groups release the latest movies and TV-shows on various torrent sites, and are among the largest of its kind.

The TV-group ETTV alone has uploaded over 35,000 torrents to the site already, adding dozens more every day.

Some of ETTV’s recent torrents

https://torrentfreak.com/images/ettvrecent.png

TorrentFreak had the chance to speak with SaM, one of the operators of the site. SaM says that the site now has a million unique visitors per day who generate 12 million pageviews.

To serve this kind of traffic, the torrent site uses 20 servers scattered all over the world. As a comparison, five years ago it was using just nine servers to handle its userbase.

Looking back, SaM is proud that ET has become a home, not just to torrent users, but also to many prominent uploader and encoder groups.

“One of my best memories is that we became the home site of many known torrenting teams and encoders such as FXG, FXM, 3Li, DDR, and many other talents,” SaM says.

“And we still are the place to look for quality content, such as the releases of ETRG, ETTV, ETHD among many others,” the ExtraTorrent operator adds.

One of the site’s strengths, he believes, is having dedicated and experienced staff to verify torrents as well as a loyal user base. To keep the latter happy, ET continues to improve the site.

“We have just added a new chat platform to ET and continue to add user-friendly features for faster and better searching and browsing, to make it easier to use the site,” SaM says.

In addition, they just announced a new contest where people can win a MacBook Pro, iPhone 7 or VPN accounts if they guess the most downloaded movies on the site correctly.

While ExtraTorrent has something to celebrate today, it has thus far been quite a grim year for torrent sites, with both KickassTorrent and Torrentz.eu disappearing a few months ago.

ExtraTorrent has thus far been spared on any serious legal trouble and believes that, while there might be some change along the way, there’s certainly a future for torrents.

“The online torrent world will change, but torrents will always be there,” SaM concludes.

Source: Torrentfreak.com