YouTorrent is a .torrent file search engine that recently went legal. YouTorrent indexed results from The Pirate Bay, and btjunkie earlier. Basically, YouTorrent just pulled a Napster.

YouTorrent is like the Google of .torrent search.  There aren’t any ads on the homepage, just the search engine box and the logo.  Now that YouTorrent stopped aggregating content from all the other larger .torrent search engines, less people stayed using YouTorrent.

I did not really use YouTorrent much before because I’m not really into downloading .torrent files.  As a matter of fact, today was the first time I actually tried out a search on YouTorrent.  But now it seems like there are some interesting DJ mash-ups on here.

Since YouTorrent does not have any ads, the site most likely does not make much revenue (if any at all).  But the platform works great.  And YouTorrent receives around 10 million unique visitors per month.

“We have had some interest [to buy] from some parties. On that basis, we have presented the site to other parties in the space to see if there is interest there also,” stated Patrick, one of the founders of YouTorrent.  YouTorrent may be a good acquisition for BitTorrent to make.  BitTorrent acquired µTorrent, the software for downloading .torrent files in December 2006.

Information Sources:
[1] TorrentFreak: YouTorrent Goes Legal, and Up For Sale by Ernesto
[2] TechCrunch: YouTorrent On The Market, Switches To Legal Torrents by Duncan Riley

I found this on a forum via Digg. The amount was not disclosed. On the forum, Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol and Ludvig Strigeus, the writer of µTorrent announced that “BitTorrent has acquired µTorrent as it recognized the merits of µTorrent’s exceptionally well-written codebase and robust user community. Bringing together µTorrent’s efficient implementation and compelling UI with BitTorrent’s expertise in networking protocols will significantly benefit the community with what we envision will be the best BitTorrent client.”

The forum also mentioned that µTorrent’s software will remain lightweight, but the acquisition had mainly taken place to for access to µTorrent’s user-base. Some of the Digg users that have commented on the post see the acquisition as a bad move, but others are hoping that through this acquisition, µTorrent will be compatible for Linux and the Mac.

Two Digg users, akarpo and ikonoclasm were talking about the possibilities of DRM clients being implemented into µTorrent. “BitTorrent Inc. signed a deal with the movie industry last week because the industry wants to stop piracy” stated Digg user, ikonoclasm.

On November 29, Mike Arrington at TechCrunch wrote about how BitTorrent raised $25 million.