Demonoid domains for sale, uTorrent going ad supported

Lots of torrent news over the weekend for those downloading, legitimately and not.

First up, Demonoid's domain names have now been listed for sale. The site has been down for some  time, with some fans of the popular torrent search site suggesting that perhaps it was just a temporary outage; since that had happened before, in the history of the site. However, a few days later with an official announcement from the IFPI, it became clear that Demonoid would not be making a triumphant return. Now the final nails can be heard being hammered into the site's coffin, as all the domain names (Demonoid.me, Demonoid.com and Demonoid.ph) can now be found for sale on Sedo, a popular domain sales site.

KitGuru Says: With the announcement from the IFPI that along with the site takedown, a criminal investigation was ongoing in Mexico where it is believed the site's administrators reside, this could be an attempt to build some capital in order to mount a legal defence. It could also give them a chance to ride off into the sunset with a fat purse to accompany them.

The other big torrent story over the weekend was that the world's most popular BitTorrent client, uTorrent, would begin supporting adverts. With over 125 million active users, the owners of the application, BitTorrent Inc. are expected to make a serious amount of money – despite the impending public backlash from fans of the once minimalist software.

Adverts will be displayed from within the client itself, making it difficult for anyone that uses it to avoid them. Some of it will come in the form of sponsored torrents, which users will have to individually click away from in order to remove. These will highlight content from advertisers, which BitTorrent Inc. has described (via TorrentFreak) as “films, games, music, software” and more, suggesting the company is looking to target a wide range of advertisers. That aspect of this at least makes sense, since the popular client is often used to download such mediums – though not necessarily always on the right side of the law.

To date, most of the company's revenue has come from people using the toolbar that comes bundled with the torrent client.

KitGuru Says: While most of the feedback on this story from users has been negative, this does have the potential to legitemise torrents that bit more. Sure it doesn't go as far as The Promo Bay, but it could mean media companies begin injecting money into the torrent industry, not necessarily a bad thing for press and for its future as a platform.

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