I noticed that a lot of files that I download from public torrent trackers would contain a promotional material for various web sites. Some seeders would often include files with links promoting their sites and various affiliate programs with ripped music cd-s, movies, pictures, books, tv series and other stuff you could find on these torrent trackers.
I wanted to see how successful this kind of web site promotion is. I checked the traffic stats for most famous public trackers like thepiratebay.org, mininova.org and btjunkie.org through alexa and adbrite to estimate the traffic these sites get.
thepiratebay.org is ranked 100 on alexa and adbrite says it gets over 1,200,000 daily unique users, mininova.org has rank of 52 on alexa and adbrite says it gets over 1,500,000 daily unique users and lastly btjunkie.org has rank of 412 according to alexa and gets over 260,000 unique daily visitors according to adbrite.
Although alexa and adberite these stats are not to be trusted literally you get the general idea of the traffic these sites get. If I would compare theses stats to some of my sites I’d say you’d have to multiply unique visitors numbers by 2 to get more actual numbers of traffic these sites get.
In any case you could get enormous exposure advertising on these sites, but the quality of the traffic measured in buying power is probably very low so most you could probably use it for is to make a niche community out of it.
Anyway for the last month each week I would pack all the latest trailers for movies that I convert to 3gp and mp4 format, so you can play them on your mobile devices, and upload these packs to above free public torrent sites. When uploading files I also included links to movly’s mobile movie trailers site and this blog expecting to get a decent amount of traffic if the above visitor numbers are correct.
Well, I was rather shocked to find out that my expectations were hugely overestimated. After making four packs of mobile 3gp and mp4 movie trailers, seeding them for a month I can say for sure that promoting a site in this way is probably a waste of time. If you look at the google analytics stats number you can see a spike in traffic on the day when the movly blog was created and after that the exposure on all the free torrent sites didn’t materialize in any significant traffic flow. On average I uploaded about 10GB per mobile trailers pack meaning some 200 people downloaded each pack and yet after the time went by I would only get about 5 visits to the blog per day. Maybe I made a mistake by not putting aXXo in the name of the torrent’s description.
Another thing I also noticed that after a month only google would send some search engine traffic to the blog although the url-s were submitted to all major search engines.
Anyway I think I’d get better results by building traffic with some link exchange with sites that get 100 visitors a day than with torrent sites that get over 1,000,000 visitors a day.
