14 DAY TRIAL // Google's video sharing service has found the elements that made the brand as famous and successful as it is today copied and transformed into the image of a torrent site that is said to also be a huge success. Or, at least that's what the team behind it claims it to be, with over 150,000 searches a day, in the first three days ever since it came online.
First off, there's the familiar "You" element in the name of the site: YouTorrent.com. That doesn't necessarily mean a lot, but it hones in on an already known to be a catchy means of spelling. As a matter of fact, to be honest, YouTorrent aggregates results from a dozen separate torrent search sites, including the two remaining giants, Mininova and The Pirate Bay. It auto includes sorting of the results based on date of origin, number of seeds and peers.
The second thing that they've "borrowed" from YouTube is the design of its logo: just the same as the Mountain View-based company's video sharing service, just that the colors are changed, as you can see in the screenshot on the left: instead of red there's orange and the white and black have been interchanged. That and the addition of spelling suggestions (more of related searches that actually include obvious spelling corrections) make it look like a product that is of pretty good quality and in which a lot of work has gone into.
On to the legal part, there's of course the similarity related to the copyrights that YouTube also has, but YouTorrent sports a hefty legal disclaimer that is supposed to make it look legit on that end, not their fault for this, and that is not responsible for its user's actions, you know, the usual.
Just earlier today, I mentioned the "association" of an online computer shop to Firefox for obvious advertising purposes, now this. Is it a trend or just some good thinking on their part?