In recent years, streaming services have taken over the globe. People don’t rely on torrenting websites since they no longer need to download the entire file. They can just stream the content online without filling up their storage space. However, there are many who still prefer downloading content, and they have hard drives filled with TBs of data collected from sites such as YTS, PB, and Nyaa.
About Nyaa
Nyaa is a torrent website that focuses on anime and video game content. The content specifically caters to the needs of the East Asian audience but it’s not limited to them. Most of the content that you find on the website has a high demand in countries such as the US, Germany, Albania, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and other parts of Europe as well. Nyaa has been in the torrent sphere for a long time, however, it keeps switching the domain to protect itself. This is a common practice in the torrenting world where you’d find numerous proxies for a single site.
Most of the content that you find on Nyaa can be downloaded quickly primarily because it has a lot of seeds. More seeds mean better download speed. And thus, Nyaa does provide a commendable download speed because of the seeds. Nyaa also has a sister site referred to as ‘Sukebei’ which caters to different audiences, the one which likes adult movies and games. When you visit Nyaa, you’ll have an option in the header section known as ‘Fap’, upon clicking that option, you’ll be able to access ‘Sukebei’.
History of Nyaa
NyaaTorrents draws inspiration from a Japanese onomatopoeia for cat’s meow. In 2011, the site was targeted for copyright infringements. In 2014, the site was a target of a large DDoS attack. Three years later, it entered Alexa’s 1000 most popular websites on the Internet. In May 2017, Nyaa’s .se, .eu, and .org domains were deactivated. The owners confirmed that they’ve taken the site down voluntarily. In June 2017, it was reported that Goodlabs – a Germany based company put up a fake Nyaa site in a bid to get users to download malware.
Nyaa operates on BitTorrent and is geared towards Japanese, Korean, and Chinese audiences. It is the world’s biggest anime-dedicated torrent index. Though it has been in the torrent sphere for nearly a decade, last year marked the darkest period in Nyaa’s existence. On May 1, 2019, the site was inaccessible and was down for more than 3 days. The outage continued until May 4, 2019, after which the website was live again albeit on a new domain.
Though no official statement was released from the owners of Nyaa, it is rumored that the owners were worried about a potential legal action that could land them in hot waters. And that’s the reason why they tried to cease their operations for a few days. The war against piracy has led to the demise of many torrent sites. However, with the rise of streaming services, the focus seems to have shifted towards the illegal streaming sites as compared to torrent sites.
What should you expect from the Nyaa?
Sign-up is Optional – The most trustworthy torrent sites are the ones that don’t require you to sign-in. And Nyaa being one of them doesn’t ask you to sign-up. You can visit the site, and start downloading the content from the inner page without signing up at all. You can do so as a guest. This feature is always appreciated as most of the time, you don’t want to give away your email address to a site you cannot trust.
Dark Mode – 2019 brought a huge wave of dark mode with it. People went crazy and wanted all the platforms to have this mode. Since torrent sites are your usual platforms or networking community, it’s positive to see the developers taking the demand into consideration. To enter the dark mode, you can scroll all the way to the bottom and just click on the ‘on/off’ switch and you’re done.
Diverse Categories – The most fascinating aspect of torrent sites is that you get plenty of categories. You can choose what’s best for you and have a lot of freedom in doing so. On Nyaa, you can choose from various Anime options – ‘Anime Music Video’, ‘English-translated’, ‘Non-English translated’, and ‘Raw’. You can choose between ‘Lossless’, and ‘Lossy’ Audio. Other than that, you get to decide on Literature, Live Action, Pictures, Software i.e. Games and Application alongside other options.
How to access Nyaa?
You can access Nyaa by searching for the term ‘Nyaa’ in your search engine. Alternatively, if you want to access the platform directly, you can use the following link: Nyaa.si. Remember, there are two extensions of the website and thus using the link is the easiest way of finding the website.
- https://nyaa.si
Before you access Nyaa, it’s important for you to know that protecting your IP and your device should be your priority. Most of the time when you engage in illegal content downloading, your IP can be tracked by your ISP and the local authorities. In order to avoid any trouble, it’s important that you stream anonymously when you’re accessing such platforms. That’s the reason why I recommend you use a VPN. Using a VPN will help protect your data and your identity not just from hackers but regulatory authorities as well.
Interface
Nyaa has a simple interface and that’s exactly what you expect from a torrent site. You are just on it for the content and so the aesthetics are not something you care about over browsing and navigation. I tried clicking on ‘Tower of God’, and without any misclicks, I was directed to an inner page which was a good experience. Most of these torrent sites often redirect you and that’s quite frustrating. Nyaa, on the other hand, cares about user experience and that’s evident in their interface.
Header – The moment you enter the website, you find options such as ‘Upload’, ‘Info’, ‘RSS’, ‘Twitter’, and ‘Fap’. As mentioned above, if you’re interested in adult content, you can click on the ‘Fap’ option and it will redirect you to another website. Likewise, there are plenty of other ways to find the content. You can choose to use categories, search bar, and filter. All of this adds to the overall user experience
Inner Pages – When you click on any title, you’ll be able to access the inner page of the website. Upon doing so, you’ll find valuable information regarding ‘Category’, ‘Submitter’, ‘Information’, ‘File Size’, ‘Date’, ‘Seeders’, ‘Leechers’, ‘Completed’, and ‘Info Feeds’. Other than that, you’ll find the downloadable file followed by a Magnet link. As you scroll down, you’ll find various comments related to the file. Reading those can be really helpful before you download the content.
Content
If you’re an anime lover who loves to download each and every episode of your favorite anime, you’re in for a treat. Nyaa provides all the major anime shows, movies, and games that you can think of. While browsing the website and checking for some HD shows, I found the likes of ‘Kaguya-sama-wa-Kokurasetai’, ‘Gleipnir’, ‘Tower of God’, ‘Hamefura’, ‘Honzuki no Gekokujou’, and Yesterday wo Utatte’ among many others.
Desktop/Mobile experience
Downloading popular content from ‘Nyaa’ is not much of a hassle because of its seed capabilities. Most of the files between 700 MB to 1.5 GB can be downloaded within 10 minutes if you have an internet speed of 4MBPS or more.
Average Seeds – Based upon the top 10 content on this site, their average seeds were 1300-1400. 90% of the top content was seeded well which means that if you decided to download the content using a stable internet connection, you’d have a 1-1.5 GB file downloaded within a matter of 10 minutes.
Average leeches – Based upon the top 10 content on this site, the average leeches were 70-80. Since they are only 5% as compared to the seeds, there should be no trouble downloading the content. The most popular content was downloaded by 25711 users and it has 22 leeches against 1623 seeds.
Nyaa in numbers
Nyaa is truly a trusted and most visited anime site. It draws more than 41 million users each month. It’s astonishing how this anime site manages to attract millions of users. On average, each session on this site lasts for 7 minutes with an average page/visit of 7.99. In addition to that, Nyaa has a mind-boggling bounce rate of just 21.14%.
Suggestions I have for Nyaa
If this platform manages to stay active, I’d be more than happy. I don’t have any complaints, I just wish that more torrent websites were like this one. The only suggestion from my end would be to provide content in more languages. Because anime as a content attracts global attention and so just restricting it to English is limiting the popularity of the content and the platform.
Conclusion
Nyaa is definitely a torrent site that you can trust when it comes to downloading content. However, before you do so, make sure that you’re using a VPN to protect your identity from ISP and regulatory authorities. Simple design and smooth navigation make it one of my favorite torrent websites on the internet.
PROS
- Decent design
- Great Content
- HD Resolution
- Popular Platform
- No ads
CONS
- Anime-centric content
- Language functionality may be limited