

Ask HN:What happened to Download sites? - csomar

Today I checked traffic for some big download portals: download.com, brothersoft.Com and tucows.com<p>I found out (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/download.com+brothersoft.com+tucows.com/) that they lost very important amount of traffic; very very important.<p>I began to search and fond that it's happening for most (all sites i searched!) download sites; sites like download manager (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/freedownloadmanager.org/) that were growing quickly and bigly, lost traffic and "in the same time".<p>Does any one know why? I'm really curious to know what happening to them?
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SwellJoe
They are useless vestiges of an age in which search didn't work, and
maintaining a website for a project or product (and handling the bandwidth
demands that entails) was harder than it is now.

They are the wrong tool for the job on the modern web, and they were never
very good at it even when they did provide a tiny bit of value. In short,
they're a waste of space.

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aj
A lot of applications are also moving to the cloud as a service. Not all, but
a lot. And a lot of them are distributed directly by the developer(s)
increasingly as bandwidth and storage become cheaper by the day

