January 31, 2010 by sharky
More than ever before, members are being held responsible for sustaining trackers that can’t properly monetize themselves without a steady flow of donations or other fund-raising ideas. All sorts of trackers are doing this - past & present - just read the news; both SqN & ScL have been on the brink of extinction recently. In the case of ScL - here’s a tracker that almost predictably goes offline towards the end of each fiscal month. Even good "niche" trackers such as Comic-Releech & Animatoonic simply couldn’t go on bleeding red forever.
Source below: Vortex homepage. Site Update: 25 January 2010:
….unless something changes in the next 5 days, we will be ceasing operations at the end of the January. Over the last five months, we have consistently failed to reached our donations goals. As a result, it was necessary to tap the site savings to cover the monthly hosting fees. If we see a surge of donations to cover the hosting we will continue, if not then we won’t. It is as simple as that. Before someone starts a flame thread, let us make this perfectly clear. We are not begging for donations, merely stating the facts. If it comes to pass that we cease operations, please know that we have enjoyed your patronage, friendship and participation.
Regards,
~The Vortex Network Staff
It’s unknown - but doubtful - that Vortex can weather the storm, as their donation target is still stuck at 5%.
Compared to other trackers that are struggling, Vortex is in a class of their own.
- • The site was never ‘open publicly for registration’, although potential members could request an invite through an interview in their IRC channel.
- • Vortex had some unfavorable publicity in reference to the original owner, which clearly hurt their popularity. No question that if people hadn’t heard about Vortex before that post, they surely had now.
- • Few people know about them. They have a policy whereby its URL is forbidden to be used publicly, "To protect the community we respectfully ask that all users refer to the site as ‘The Eye of The Storm’ when referring to it in any medium that is not between two users of the site." Apparently this is (or was) enforced strongly as shown in this old warning:
VortexNetwork - Stats
Vortex’s popularity has been on a steady decline as of late, as evidenced by the following stats:
- • Had an Alexa Rank of 300,534 on March 23rd, 2009. Today, it’s 532,438.
- • Had 6,636 members in July 2008, which slid to 5,732 in March ‘09. Today, Vortex has just 2,925 members.
- • Total number of indexed torrents have dropped by a count of nearly 500 over the past nine months. Today, there are just 69 leechers for 2,228 total torrents.
| Stats: July 2008 | Stats: January 2010 |
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Lack of activity means less torrents; less torrents = fewer members. Less members = fewer donating members (as a percentage). Unless Vortex either throws up some form of advertising or else opens registration publicly to get new blood, there won’t be any tracker soon.
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