Belies recent reports that P2P traffic has declined to 15-20% of overall traffic in North America, down from 37% back in 2007.
Despite earlier claims to the contrary, it seems BitTorrent is more popular than ever these days with news that the BitTorrent client uTorrent has nearly doubled its userbase to some 52 million unique users per month and that all the major tracker sites have seen a significant increase in visitors.
Arbor Networks, a company which sells subscriber traffic management equipment to ISPs, released the results of a study back in September that concluded P2P traffic is down to roughly 15-20% of all North American traffic.
That’s down substantially from the 37% of all North American traffic P2P reportedly consumed back in 2007.
It even released a larger, worldwide study a month later which it said proved “globally P2P is declining and it is declining quickly.” It even went so far as to suggest that P2P is all but dead to ISPs as they focus their energy on the more pressing concern of streaming video.
It’s now being suggested that if you look closely at the reports that that they may be true, but that in terms of absolute traffic P2P continues to grow.
In fact, according to TorrentFreak, the number of unique users of uTorrent, the most popular BitTorrent client around, doubled from 28 million in November 2008 to almost 52 million last month.
“In addition to this, at the start of this year we saw almost 5 million monthly users of BitTorrent Mainline,” says Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management. “In November 2009 we saw over 10 million.”
The figures prove that despite all the legal setbacks with sites like Mininova, The Pirate Bay, or more recently isoHunt, BitTorrent is as healthy and as popular as ever.
Stay tuned.
I think a point needs to be made that there’s a difference between downloading the uTorrent App and using it on a regular basis. This can be explained well with the comments a while back made by Braham Cohen who said that many BitTorrent users are more casual than before. Instead of downloading 24/7, they’re more likely to be downloading something one day, then downloading something else a few days later.
Every non homeless person generally speaking has a window, but we’re not always looking through it all the time.
This is good news. In my opinion, there isn’t a better way to protest the anti-p2p organizations than to double the bitorrent user base. Lets show some more support.