KickAss Torrents (Photo : Facebook)
More than a week after the arrest of alleged KickassTorrents owner Artem Vaulin, the once most popular file-sharing site remains offline. There is no way to tell how long KAT will stay down but fortunately for torrent fans clones, mirrors and legitimate alternatives remain available with the likes of The Pirate Bay, ExtraTorrent and Torrentz leading the way.
With KAT almost certainly gone for good, users have no recourse but to seek torrent alternatives and the migration, according to Tech Times, led to significant traffic spikes for former KAT rivals. The biggest gain so far has been registered by ExtraTorrent, which the report said saw its membership ballooning to around 200% since KickassTorrents was taken down by the U.S. government.
The number of visitors recorded by ExtraTorrent since last week also jumped by whopping 300% and site operators directly credited KAT's seeming demise as the chief reason for the growth.
It's the same case for the torrent search engine Torrentz, which also generated notable increase in traffic in the past days.
But the more significant leap is that of The Pirate Bay, which surely will retake the throne as the most popular torrent site in the absence of KickassTorrents. Users are quite familiar with TPB and feel relatively safe navigating through the site so it's but automatic that the former king will take place that KAT has reluctantly vacated. Among the so-called KAT alternatives, TPB is likely the most preferred by users for its huge library of free digital contents that in most cases are safe to download or stream (for the playable files).
In spite of the torrent alternatives readily available, a number of players opted to pick up where KAT had left off by setting the so-called KickassTorrents proxy, clone and mirror sites. The most prominent of which, according to MobiPicker, is KickassTorrents.website. Its operator, isoHunt, claims that the mirror exists to serve KAT fans that were suddenly orphaned by the site's abrupt exit from the scene.
Other clones emerged in the wake of the KickassTorrents takedown and MobiPicker listed at least seven more:
- http://kickasstorrents.to/
- http://settorrent.com/
- https://kat.al/
- https://dxtorrent.com/
- https://kickass.la
- https://katstorrents.co
- https://kickass.unblocked.cat
One mirror, KAT.am, should have been part of the list but it was taken down in recent days though according to TorrentFreak two KAT clones immediately popped up to take its place - kickass.cd and kickass.mx. The two sites are up thanks to the same KAT.am operators, the report added.
And there are KickassTorrents alternatives too that are relative newbies but already gained considerable traction. The most notables are YTS.ag, which is the unauthorized replacement for YTS/YIFY group and specializes in providing movie torrents in small size but decent quality, and EZTV.ag. The latter has attracted attention for its uploads of popular TV series like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones.
