Hello to all,

I want to present you my project - torrtilla.ru . The project is not young, and perhaps many of you have already heard about it, because it has existed for more than a year and a half. During this time, its audience has reached 15-17 thousand unique users per day. Today I would like to draw a symbolic line and talk about what was achieved in the first year and a half, plans for the future, share the statistics and also present a new UI.

About the service

Torrtila is a real-time search engine for torrents, or more precisely, a meta-search parser for torrent trackers.
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The idea of ​​the service is quite simple - we take a keyword, perform a search on other sites, parse the results, display it on one page, and allow the user to filter by category, sort by various criteria, such as the number of distributors, file size, etc. Thus, the service saves the user's time when choosing torrents simultaneously on multiple trackers.

A bit of history

The history of the project began in January 2010, just in time for the New Year. Then I was very inspired by the site nowtorrents.com . Understanding that there is nothing similar for the Russian-language Internet, except for a few torrent indexers with a terrible interface, I decided to create my own search engine.

The first version was written in 2 weeks in haste. Then began a tedious wait. In the first month, the site was visited by about 50 - 70 people per day, half from Yandex, the other half from the links I posted where I could.



Throughout 2010, the audience continued to grow mainly due to search engines, but this growth was very slow, and by the end of 2010 the audience was about 4,000 visitors per day . All this time I have been finalizing the service. With an increase in attendance, I had to rewrite a lot, make multi-level caching, minimize database access, etc.

In terms of promotion, I practically did nothing, did not advertise anywhere, exchanged links several times and that's it. The whole first year of its existence torrtilla.ru lived on an American hosting costing $ 56 a year, which I already had by that time, that is, I literally did not invest anything except my personal time.

The year 2011 began with cardinal changes, attendance during the New Year holidays doubled, I thought it was the “weekend effect”, but after the holidays the growth did not stop, and by the end of January attendance doubled again. In February, the site had 20 thousand unique users per day according to liveinternet. (Sharp growth, as it turned out, was provided by Google, who suddenly loved me). At the same time, the growth of attendance ended, then the spring months began, in which user interest began to subside (as I noted from the rutracker statistics for torrents in general). Then summer came - the low season, attendance dropped to 15 thousand per day, and is currently at the same level.

With the increase in attendance in January, there were problems on the hosting, for a few days the account was generally blocked for exceeding all quotas. So I had to move to a separate VPS. Now I pay 19 euros per month for a Leaseweb virtual machine with 512 MB of memory, and this is enough for Torrtila.

I experimented a lot, tried to attract users from twitter using twitterfeed, made an application for Vkontakte, an extension for Google Chrome , tried to help users to use torrtilla.ru as a default search in the uTorrent client. Of all this, the expansion for chrome worked best of all, its traffic is about 2000 hops per day, the traffic from the contact is about 100 hops per day, the rest of the methods were ineffective for me.

Statistics

For all the time of the site existence:

• Torrtilla.ru was visited by 6.7 million people
• About 10 million searches were performed.

Statistics for all time

As I mentioned above, the beginning of the growth of "popularity" is in January 2011.

Statistics for the last month

Over the past 30 days on the site there were half a million visitors , of which 300 thousand unique.

Traffic sources:

• 30% Forward traffic
• 18% Referring Sites
• 52% Search engines

Monetization

At first Torrtila was my hobby, and I was wondering what would come of it. Over time, when the popularity grew, I thought that it would be good for the service to pay for itself, its hosting. The first experiments were various banner affiliate programs, then teasers. Finally, I settled on one system that brought in a little more money than others. At that time it was some 1-2 dollars per day. Let me remind you that the site’s audience was about 3,000 people.

Once a manager from the MarketGuide system approached me with a proposal to place their informer. I agreed, and I already earned about $ 3 a day on them. With winter growth in attendance, the amount of income from the informers increased to $ 6 per day. (the informers were located at the bottom of the page, and I think this is the maximum that could be squeezed out of their position).

Then, with increasing popularity, I was offered several times to sell the site, but I did not consider these offers seriously. I was interested to experiment with my project and watch it grow. Since its inception, I have learned a lot, since one was involved in everything: programming, design, layout, seo-optimization, smm marketing, looking for new ways to monetize.

Experiments with contextual advertising, as well as with advertising lines Nolix did not lead to anything. Their placement was not effective for me.

Now the service makes a profit, and practically does not require human supervision. Everything happens in the automatic mode, I do not need to fill it with content, moderate and engage in any other "manual" control. Therefore, I am doing an excellent job with him alone, and I have time for experiments, other projects and also time to go on until the main work.

A new style

Yesterday Torrtila was released in a completely new interface.
First, a few screenshots of the new version.

1. completely redesigned home

On the main appeared top series and games, as well as the sidebar.

2. a new kind of search results

Now the site is "rubber", but it does not stretch to infinity, and it looks equally good both on a small netbook and on a wide HD monitor. The remaining differences you can appreciate yourself by visiting the new and old version:

• The old interface is located at: old.torrtilla.ru
• New is now used by default: torrtilla.ru

Future plans

In the future, functional innovations will be the minimum number, mainly I plan to concentrate on ergonomics and usability. This is done in order not to blur the boundaries of the project and not to glut it with incomprehensible "features" that are irrelevant. Torrtilla is a search engine for torrents and they will remain in the future.

The plans were also expansion to the whole world. And now, for about a month, TorrentFish.org , a search engine for global torrent trackers such as thepiratebay, isohunt , etc. , works . He is still young and little visited, but I hope it is not for long.

Taking this opportunity, I suggest everyone to evaluate the innovations themselves, and if you wish, to comment on what you liked and what did not.

UPD
Yesterday service sustained habraeffekt , was 79 900 views. More details can be found in the statistics .