KickAssTorrents.com is a new player in the torrent search space creating an easy and currently ad-free way to search for music, TV shows, movies, eBooks, and software.

The torrent portal launched publicly back in February 2009 and in under 10 months has quickly become a serious player in the torrent space.

KickAssTorrents has told WebTVwire.com that it receives over 100,000 visitors each day. A quick look at the traffic growth on Alexa confirms this:

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Sweet Usability

Upon arriving on KickAssTorrents.com you’ll instantly notice the clean design, ease of use, and obvious absence of advertising.

Torrent sites have become the underground playhouse for scammy advertisers promising russian wives, instant weight loss, hot girls in your area, and seedy work from home opportunities.

It is a breath of fresh air to see a torrent site that lacks advertising, but the site is still young and KickAssTorrentz could yet be seduced by the promise of ad-revenue checks.

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Torrent sites continue to be blamed for the many ills of society. But wait, is it not just a case of the technology not being used correctly and the way in which it was intended? VODO thinks so, and is attempting to open up torrent sites for filmmakers to utilize.

Torrent Sites

What are torrent sites used for? Many of you would have answered that it’s pretty much all pirated content being shared via torrents. And while there is a lot of copyrighted material being shared illegally on them, there is also much that is legal and copyright-free.

There are very few companies and organizations who have taken advantage of the technology as a way to distribute content thus far. But VODO is one of these, allowing and encouraging filmmakers to use torrent sites to seed their features and get them out there being watched.

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Porn is popular and profitable, especially on the Internet where the thirst for it is insatiable and where every need is catered for. But can a peer-to-peer BitTorrent company monetize porn to the extent it becomes a business in its own right – especially when free, pirated porn is readily available?

The Internet Is For Porn

There’s no way to get around the fact that one of the most popular aspects of the Internet is for porn. The Avenue Q song, The Internet Is For Porn, rather says it all. Not only is it hugely popular but it’s also one of the most profitable slices of the Internet, whether your morals tell you that is right or wrong.

BitTorrent companies, on the other hand, may provide a service which many of us use on a regular basis but making money is a little trickier. As the four founders of The Pirate Bay will attest, the money made doesn’t cover the cost of the fines meted out when your company is taken to court for copyright infringements.

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It seems peer to peer companies in China are making big money, both by way of venture capital investments, and an increasingly profitable amount of advertising dollars.

One current example is Chinese P2P company Xunlei (a P2P download manager – the Chinese equivalent of Vuze) is in talks with US venture capital companies to raise a final round of $100 million. This would add to the $30 million it has already raised, including $5 million from Google.

Advertising & Traffic Upturn

According to iResearch, PPLive and PPStream, two Chinese companies that stream TV using P2P technology, are also seeing an upturn, with advertisers increasingly signing deals with the sites, which goes hand in hand with millions of users watching video streams on the sites.

Virtually every Web user will have a Flash Player from Adobe installed, as it’s one of those must haves if you want to do anything multimedia on the Internet. But now, there is an updated version available, with many new features.

Here, Jef Pearlman of Public Knowledge discusses the possibilities it provides for online video distribution.

Flash Gets Flashier With P2P

If you haven’t heard yet, a beta of Adobe’s Flash Player Version 10 is available for download. It offers a host of new features, but one has implications that blow the others out of the water: built-in peer-to-peer. That’s right, all the tools necessary to build a p2p client will be built into the Flash plug-in.

Everyone who installs Flash 10 (and before long, that will be practically everyone) will soon have peer-to-peer clients running in their web browser of choice. What does this do? 

You may think the world already has enough Web TV applications to be going on with.

But the likes of Joost, Hulu, Vuze, Babelgum and more, now have a new competitor.

Blinkx already offer a video search engine, which enables users to browse their way through streaming videos from Google, YouTube, Metacafe and more.

Blinkx BBTV Launched

Now it has decided to try and compete in the already overcrowded online television sector, and today launched Blinkx BBTV (BroadBand TV) on to the masses.

The service offers the usual bells and whistles that you’d expect it to, with high quality video streaming, full screen viewing, and a choice of channels over many genres.

So far, so samey.

With most of the big players in the Web TV and streaming video industry being based in North America, read Google, YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo!, it’s easy to forget this is a worldwide phenomenon.

We already know that the amount of Internet traffic heading to online video sites in the US is rising rapidly, and the business model is slowly but surely getting worked out.

Now we learn that traffic in the UK is also rising at a massive rate, with the latest statistics showing a rise of 178% in online traffic being targeted at video sites in Britain over the last year.