| YggTorrent | |
| Type: | Torrent index |
| Registration: | Mandatory |
| Language: | French |
| Num Users: | More than 5 million |
YggTorrent (sometimes abbreviated as Ygg) is a French private torrent directory and BitTorrent tracker created in 2017.
According to Alexa Internet, as of January 1, 2020, it ranked as the 35th most visited website in France, making it the most popular in its category bittorrent directories and downloading website.
The site frequently changed its top-level domain to evade site blocking by French authorities, censorship, or domain name suspensions.
YggTorrent is indexing digital audiovisual content, video games, as well as digital books and software. Founded in its current form in July 2017 by a French-speaking team, YggTorrent allows visitors to search, download, and contribute by adding torrent files, thus facilitating file sharing among users of the BitTorrent protocol.
As a file-sharing site with copyrighted material, usage of YggTorrent may be illegal in some jurisdictions. The site allows the sharing of content that is copyrighted, which may be illegal without proper rights acquisition.[1]
On May 21, 2017, the yggtorrent.com domain name was registered for the first time.[2] The site's administrators initially made it a public bittorrent directory listing a limited number of torrents[3] Following the closure of t411 on June 26, 2017, the site underwent significant changes and officially opened its doors as a participatory public tracker in early July 2017. Its administrators chose after a few weeks to turn it into a private tracker with open registration.
On October 31, 2017, t411.si, a highly visited clone of the t411 site, announced its closure and merger with YggTorrent.[4] [5] On December 1, YggTorrent was delisted by the search engine Google in response to repeated copyright infringements and numerous DMCA claims sent to Google by copyright holders.[6]
As of December 8, 2017, the site had more than 600,000 members, 173,000 torrents, accumulating a total of more than two million connected peers.
In December 2018, Numerama published an interview with a former site administrator who indicated that the site had generated 300,000 euros in four months[7] and also revealed the total number of torrents on the site in December 2018, which was just under 280,000 torrents.
In early 2020, the site reported 3,500,000 users on Twitter without specifying the duplicate, triple, and multiple accounts also used by the team. In 2021, the site listed slightly more than 490,000 torrents,[8] many of which were inactive.[9]
On February 5, 2020, the site's domain name was deactivated by the domain name registrar for "infringements around intellectual property, or legal rights of copyright holders, such as the exclusive right to reproduce, distribute, display or perform the protected work, or to create derivative works."
On February 20, 2020, the site had its Twitter account suspended and now invites its users to follow it on Mastodon.[10]