The results are in, and the heralded return of the once-mighty Kickass Torrents website has officially faltered. Now that measurements allow for a clear analysis of the traffic numbers for the KAT reboot, rival The Pirate Bay remains on top, with ExtraTorrent, Rarbg, Torrentz2, and 1337x all holding steady.

One year ago, Kickass Torrents was the most popular torrent website in the world, and one of the most popular websites overall worldwide. A year later, it's a very different story, as former runner-up The Pirate Bay continues to grow as the No. 1 site, while Kickass Torrents hasn't made a dent in the most recently released traffic rankings.

Kickass Torrents Still Far Behind The Pirate Bay, ExtraTorrent, Rarbg, Torrentz2, And 1337x

Recently, we brought you the news that preliminary results indicated that the return of Kickass Torrents was not doing as well as expected. While the site hadn't been online for 30 days, the minimum period necessary to garner an accurate Alexa ranking for KAT's return, we instead assessed the traffic numbers for Kickass Torrents' biggest competitors since its recent return.

While we hypothesized that all five top torrent sites prior to Kickass Torrents' comeback would show some kind of traffic loss after its return, that turned out not to be the case. All five of those sites - The Pirate Bay, ExtraTorrent, Rarbg, Torrentz2, and 1337x - either held basically steady in the rankings or showed gains.

While those surprising results indicated that the Kickass Torrents comeback might not be as big as expected, it was impossible to determine for sure, until the new KAT had been online for at least 30 days. That's because Alexa ranks website traffic via a rolling average of the past 30 days' results, meaning that some days before Kickass Torrents' debut, when the little to no traffic hit the domain, were still averaged into the site ranking.

Now, however, it has been more than 30 days since the return of Kickass Torrents, and the average traffic ranking now only includes days when the site was actually back and up and running online. The current Alexa ranking places Kickass Torrents at No. 6,772, a far cry from its top Alexa rank of 85 in June 2015. Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay's ranking continues to rise. The Pirate Bay now stands at No. 97, even higher than the 108 rank we reported two weeks prior. ExtraTorrent, Rarbg, Torrentz2, and 1337x have all held steady in their rankings as well.

Why Is Kickass Torrents Faltering vs. The Pirate Bay, ExtraTorrent, Rarbg, Torrentz2, And 1337x?

Why are the traffic numbers for the new Kickass Torrents as low as they are? The main reason is likely due to the one glaring deficiency in the new site: the lack of older torrents from the prior KAT, many of which are still not available on the new one. While some have been replaced, tons of information were lost when the old site was shut down.

The new KAT maintains the same user-friendly design as its prior incarnation, arguably the best of all its competitors, and many of the same dedicated and friendly staff. If Kickass Torrents can remain online and stable for a period of time, and continue to restock popular old torrents as well as add new ones, we expect it will slowly but surely show traffic gains as it attempts to make its way back toward the top again.

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