Re: What Is The Pirate Bay Site
Niki Wienberg
There is one unavoidable newcomer, following the closure of RARBG. While some RARBG knockoffs came close, the vacant spot is filled by a familiar name, LimeTorrents, which made a comeback after being absent last year
We have limited the list to globally available English-language torrent sites, which means that sites such as Rutracker.org, Yggtorrent.qa, Etoland.co.kr, and Zamunda.net are not included, even though they have substantial traffic numbers.
Below is the full list of the top ten most-visited torrent site domains at the start of the new year. The list is based on various traffic reports. Please note that this list is created as a historical record, to keep track of the popularity of these sites over time. We also publish an annual VPN privacy review.
We do not recommend or endorse using any of these sites. Some are known to link to malicious ads, at least incidentally. BitTorrent technology itself is not illegal but may only be used to share content with permission from the rightsholder.
YTS has been the target of several lawsuits in the U.S. over the past few years. The operator signed a consent judgment and agreed to hand over user data to rightsholders. As a result, several YTS users received settlement requests or were sued instead.
NYAA.si is a popular resurrection of the anime torrent site NYAA. While there is fierce competition from alternative pirate streaming sites, the torrent portal continues to do well, climbing two positions compared to last year.
Launched a little over five years ago, TorrentGalaxy is a relative newcomer. It has a dedicated group of uploaders and an active community. In addition to torrents, TorrentGalaxy also makes some releases available for streaming.
The Pirate Bay continues to operate from its .org domain but is also available through many proxies. If all proxy domains were counted, the notorious torrent site would still battle for the first spot in this list.
Skidrow and RELOADED are two iconic game-cracking groups. This likely served as inspiration for the people running Skidrowreloaded.com, which is a blog-style release site featuring popular game releases.
LimeTorrents has been around since 2009. Like many other entries in this list, it is blocked by ISPs in countries around the world, which seems to hurt overall traffic somewhat. It dropped out of the top 10 last year but made a comeback in 2024
Disclaimer: We use various data checks, including reports from Similarweb. Proxies and clear copycats of working sites are excluded. Please keep in mind that many sites have mirrors or alternative domains, which are often not taken into account here. The yearly list is published as an informational / news resource. The 2023 torrent site list is archived.
The official blog of Writer Beware shines a bright light into the dark corners of the shadow-world of literary scams, schemes, and pitfalls. Also providing advice for writers, industry news, and commentary. Writer Beware is sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association.
Hi, just found your post after purchasing two e-books from Kiss Library a couple of days ago. One arrived as advertised in PDF form. The other was promised "in 3-6 hours" once "acquisition had been confirmed". It probably won't surprise you to learn it never came.
Total cost for the two books was a tick over $20 I paid through Paypal. A review of the Paypal transaction shows the seller tried to charge me an additional $12 for currency conversion which, to its credit, Paypal declined.
I can live with being scammed a few bucks; it's my fault for shopping while tired and rushed and not doing due diligence. But I'm infuriated to find out this site is nothing but a gang of Belorussian thieves profiting from the work of others.
I found eight entries (four titles, each one twice) immediately when I searched Victoria Strauss on kisslibrary. net: The Burning Land, The Awakened City, Guardian of the Hills, and The Lady of Rhuddesmere. All are epub+pdfs ranging in price from $5.83 to $7.65. I believe the "block you from finding it again" line. I snapped a screen shot if its helpful to you. (Hi, I'm Kyla, I read every entry, but I lurk and never comment. Thank you for doing what you do!)
That's just sickening, to say the least!! Thank you so much for warning us!
I have contacted Anti-Piracy Service Pirat.io for protecting my eBooks as it seems an affordable option rather than having to search all day on multiple search engines and submitting the DMCA notices myself.
I just cant handle it anymore, pirates are the scum of the earth! They are leeches, making money from the hard work of others without giving anything back other than damages to the authors and content creators!
Victoria, it seems entirely possible to me that it IS a big phishing scheme and does not actually have any ebook files. I've visited several sites over the past few years that authors told me were selling or giving away their books that were no more than elaborate front doors to a legitimate subscription program of some kind, or that were designed to gather personal information, including credit card numbers. Like Kiss Library, they were created by scraping public information from Amazon or some other source. Unlike Kiss Library, they looked amateurish.
An important challenge facing media industries today is whether and how copyright policy should be adapted to the realities of the digital age. The invention and subsequent adoption of filesharing technologies has eroded the strength of copyright law across many countries, and research has shown that digital piracy reduces sales of music and motion picture content. A new study that examined the effectiveness of anti-piracy efforts in the United Kingdom found that blocking websites can be effective but only when multiple channels are blocked. The website blocking policies in the U.K. caused a decrease in overall piracy and a 7 to 12% increase in the use of legal subscription sites.
The study focused on supply-side enforcement efforts, which target the sites and networks that make pirated content available to consumers. This is distinct from demand-side enforcement efforts, which target consumers and have yielded mixed results.
The study found that blocking a single site in 2012 caused no increase in the use of legal sites, but instead caused users to increase visits to other unblocked piracy sites and virtual private network sites. However, blocking 19 piracy sites in 2013 and 53 sites in 2014 caused a decrease in piracy and an increase in use of legal subscription sites of 7 to 12%, as well an increase in new paid subscriptions.
Summarized from an article in MIS Quarterly, The Effect of Piracy Website Blocking on Consumer Behavior by Danaher, B (Chapman University), Smith, MD (Carnegie Mellon University), and Telang, R (Carnegie Mellon University). Copyright 2019. All rights reserved.
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If you're a "normal" person that hasn't owned a magic kit since you were 12, you might not be aware that magic shops, like everything else these days, have moved online. From the old school Penguin Magic (who recommend using Netscape Navigator for the best experience) to the more "hip" sites like Ellusionist and Theory11, the latest magic is only a few clicks away.
So now, instead of driving 40 minutes to some cigarette-smoke-filled store on the third floor of an office building (or, heaven forbid, going to a library), you can just fire up a web browser and start learning "The World's Toughest Card Trick" without ever leaving your couch.
If you saw that this post was about a "magic pirate" and are waiting for the spell-casting sailor to come into the story, then I'm sorry to disappoint you. Because yes, this site is selling stolen magic. How do I know? Two things:
See, you might assume that it's just a scam, where they take your money through some un-recoverable means and then never send you anything. On closer inspection that doesn't make a lot of sense though. Firstly, these sites only sell downloadable products, not anything that would require shipping. If the whole thing is just a lie, they'd have no need to restrict the inventory that way since they wouldn't actually have to ship anything regardless.
Secondly, they generally don't accept the kinds of cash-equivalent payment methods (Western Union, iTunes Gift Cards, etc.) that scammers use. I have seen a few that take Bitcoin, but by far the most common method is PayPal.
I decided that the only way to satisfy my curiosity would be to actually put in an order for my own product, and see what (if anything) they would send me. To be clear: don't try this at home. I used burner contact and payment information, along with a VPN and some other safeguards. Even so, I'm sending money to criminals, which is generally a bad idea. But I had to know.
Buying something from these sites wasn't as easy as you'd think. The first one I tried, "Smith Magic", required an account but wouldn't let me create one. I then tried "Super Magic", which on reflection is pretty clearly the same website with a different name.
This time it let me make an account and check out, but the payment instructions said they'd email me a link to pay, which they never did. My order number was apparently "2" though, so it's possible they've never actually had a customer before.
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