‘RuTracker’ Crowdfunds the Seeding of Old and Rare Torrents

• Torrent tracking platform ‘RuTracker’ is crowdfunding the expansion of its seeding storage.
• The site wants to support older, rare, and generally hard-to-find torrents that are poorly seeded.
• The campaign has gone well, even though the raised amounts are far from being impressive.

Russia’s biggest torrent tracker and indexer, "RuTracker," has taken an unusual approach in the field of P2P networks and is looking to crowdfund the seeding of old but still important torrents. These are files that few users care to seed anymore, but that doesn’t mean they are any less relevant or significant today.

For RuTracker to seed them, though, it would mean devoting precious resources - translating to money. More specifically, the platform needs to add 800 terabytes of storage to seed about 1.52 million old and rare torrents that are currently very unreliable.

RuTracker isn’t free of legal issues relevant to copyright infringement, as the platform is already blocked in its home country (and others) since 2016. However, the massive torrent tracker has still managed to keep the lights on for 16 years already and wants to continue strong

Given that new users are reluctant to join and contribute, RuTracker cannot continue supporting the seeding of older files based on volunteers, as those are constantly thinning out. Thus, a crowdfunding campaign was launched last month, and it has already collected around $27k.

While the amount doesn’t appear to be very impressive at first glance, it is important to understand that it comes from a pirating community consisting of users who like to get stuff for free. So, from that perspective, RuTracker managed to collect a respectable sum, and it’ll definitely be enough to buy at least 600 terabytes of storage. The key to this was the platform's massive userbase, counting 40 million unique visitors per month, so even when a tiny percentage gives as little as a single dollar, you have something going for you.

Of course, in the world of piracy and illegal operations in general, nothing is certain, and nothing is permanent. RuTracker may shut down tomorrow, and its main operators may find themselves in jail. Or someone could just take the money and leave. It’s precisely for these additional reasons that the crowdfunding act was so bold and so impressively successful.

This approach and the passion of RuTracker for older content makes the platform unique in the piracy world, as it offers a giant library of old stuff that’s pretty hard to find anywhere else. For this reason, RuTracker isn’t cherished and visited only by Russians but by an international audience.

Still, as always, we would advise you to stay away from torrent trackers since downloading stuff from there raises the risk of malware infections and also that of finding legal trouble. If you are looking for something old that is no longer available on legal channels of content distribution, then at least use a VPN and scan the downloaded files with an AV tool before you unpack/execute them.