Newzbin2 closes its doors

[4wd]

It is with regret that we announce the closure of Newzbin2.

A combination of several factors has made this the only option. For a long time we have struggled with poor indexing of Usenet, poor numbers of reports caused by the majority of our editors dropping out & no-one replacing them. Our servers have been unstable and crashing on a regular basis meaning the NZBs & NFOs are unavailable for long periods and we don't have the money to replace them.

Newzbin2 was always hoped to be a viable underground commercial venture. The figures just don't stack up. Newzbin1 was said to have had 700,000 registered users. In fact that was the total number of people who ever signed up in the history of Newzbin from 2000 onwards & only a fraction were active, loads of people dropped out & went to other sites. We reckon they had about 100,000 users and of those only a few 10's of thousands paid premium topups.That still made good money for the Newzbin1 guys. We never quite got the trust and lots of people said "Newzbin2 is an MPA trap", that stung us bad and we never got the userbase back. We don't have much more than about 40000 active users and the number of premium users is in the small thousands. It costs much more to run than we bring in, It just doesn't stack up.

To make things worse all our payment providers dropped out or started running scared. The MPA sued Paypal and are going at our innocent payment provider Kthxbai Ltd in the UK. Our other payment provider has understandably lost their nerve. Result? We have no more payment providers to offer & no realistic means of taking money (no, Bitcoin isn't credible as it's just too hard for 90% of people).

The tragedy is this: unlike Newzbin1 we are 100% DMCA compliant. We have acted on every DMCA notice we received without stalling or playing games: if there was a DMCA complaint the report was gone. Period. That was a condition of our advertising & payment partners so we complied but we never got a single complaint from the MPA. Not one.

Will we be back? not as a search service but we might run a blog from this site at some point.

Link

[SKA]

Not to be confused with Newsbin Pro software, Newzbin was considered the premier usenet search engine(the Google of Usenet),they wrote the original specs for nzb file format:  http://www.newsgroup.../newzbin-review.html

Though there are other search engines, Newzbin will be missed:
http://www.newsgroup...-search-engines.html

Ska

[JavaJones]

Yeah, I'm sort of confused how Newzbin2 had subscription fees *and* had to shut down, but Binsearch.info is free and has been doing fine for ages...

- Oshyan

[f0dder]

Yeah, I'm sort of confused how Newzbin2 had subscription fees *and* had to shut down

-JavaJones (November 30, 2012, 03:35 PM)

Because it was a warez site, and payment processors started dropping them for fear of legal flak?

[40hz]

FWIW the Open Rights Group doesn't seem to have a problem with how Newzbin was being pursued in the courts. Their only objection was the use of censorship and blocks to shut it down.

And yeah, they did have a lot of pointers to um..."interesting" stuff?

Also note what the operators were saying in their announcement. It seems the amount of money needed to run NB2 was never really there to begin with - even before the blockade. Which is understandable when you consider that people are generally reluctant to send money (which can always be traced back) to sites engaged (or even merely accused of being engaged) in questionable activities. Because if you do contribute, you could find yourself personally in trouble for abetting if the eggnog ever hit the fan.

So...nope. I think it's more they decided to cut their losses and walk away while they still could. And this action against them only accelerated their inevitable shutdown.