As the domain of pirates, porn addicts and Paris Hilton, Kat knew she needed someone expendable robust to investigate the world of file sharing. So, being the noble fellow that I am, I boldly set off and gathered a wealth of stats for you to sink your teeth into. Enjoy.
From FOXNews – Sweden: Internet use down after file-sharing law (April 2009)
- Statistics provided by the Netnod Internet Exchange, an organisation measuring Internet traffic, suggest that daily online activity in Sweden dropped by as much as 40 percent after local authorities decided to crack down on online copyright violation in April.
- A new law makes it easier to prosecute file-sharers because it requires Internet Service Providers to disclose the IP addresses of suspected violators.
Those who've used peer-to-peer applications are 10 times more likely to buy songs online. (Image by Toobydoo)
From Geek.com - Study: pirates are the music industry’s largest source of legitimate customers (April 2009)
- According to a study conducted by the BI Norwegian School of Management, those who have used peer-to-peer applications, such as BitTorrent, to pirate music are ten times more likely to purchase songs online than those who haven’t used file sharing applications.
- The study polled 1, 901 applicants between the ages of 15 and 20. Of this demographic, those who had downloaded music illegally had also paid for legal downloads an average of 75 times; compared with 7 times for those who hadn’t engaged in piracy.
- This echoes results published by the Canadian Record Industry Association during 2006.
From Mininova – 8 billion downloads and counting (May 2009)
- Mininova is one of the largest BitTorrent index sites on the Web – as is evidenced by its stats page. As of the 13 May 2009 at 11:18 AM, Mininova had clocked 8,339,819,100 downloads. That’s a whole lot of digits.
- To add to this, the site has averaged 90.8 downloads per second or 3,729,860 downloads per day since it went live in 2005.
- The tracker currently hosts nearly 1.1 million torrents and thousands of new files are uploaded daily.
From The Pirate Bay – Arr, there be statistics here, me hearty. (May 2009)
The Pirate Bay is the largest BitTorrent portal on the net.
As of 14 May 2009 at 1:26 PM, the tracker statistics are as follows:
- 3,603,700 registered users (and registration isn’t required!)
- 20,780,343 peers
- 10,608,885 seeders
- 10,171,458 leechers
- 1.777.977 torrents
Not too shabby, lad.
From TorrentFreak – uTorrent grows to 28 million monthly users (December 2008)
- uTorrent was first released in September 2005 and now holds an estimated market share of between 40 and 60 percent.
- When queried on the application’s user numbers in December 2008, Simon Morris, uTorrent’s VP of Product Management, told TorrentFreak that every month 28 million unique clients are actively used.
- By comparison, Mainline – the 2nd most popular client – is thought to have around 7 million users.
From ipoque – Internet Study 2008/2009 (February 2009)
ipoque is the leading European provider of deep packet inspection (DPI). In the latest edition of their annual Internet study, they decided to cover a further 4 regions. The report now includes statistics gathered from Northern and Southern Africa, South America and Southern Europe.
The report covers a bevy of different statistics, but I’ve only collected those relating to peer-to-peer traffic.
From Torrent Freak – Top 10 Most Pirated Games of 2008 (December 2008)
- In spite of a controversial DRM system which many claimed deterred them from purchasing the game, Spore had already sold over a million copies in September 2008.
From Torrent Freak – Top 10 Most Pirated TV-Shows of 2008 (December 2008)
From Torrent Freak – Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of 2008 (December 2008)
Both the DVD and Blu-ray releases of the Dark Knight have clocked record breaking sales.
From Torrent Freak – The Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2008 (December 2008)
According to TorrentFreak, the top ten most popular torrent sites during 2008 were as follows:
- The Pirate Bay (Compete Rank 885; Alexa Rank 117; 2007 #3)
- Mininova (Compete Rank 1,225; Alexa Rank 79; 2007 #1)
- IsoHunt (Compete Rank 1,106; Alexa Rank 200; 2007 #2)
- Torrentz (Compete Rank 2,039; Alexa Rank 220; 2007 #4)
- TorrentReactor (Compete Rank 2,150; Alexa Rank 532; 2007 #9)
- Demonoid (Compete Rank 3,869; Alexa Rank 526; 2007 #NA)
- BTjunkie (Compete Rank 3,762; Alexa Rank 625; 2007 #5)
- SumoTorrent (Compete Rank 4,110 Alexa Rank 1,019; 2007 #NA)
- BTmon (Compete Rank 4,737 Alexa Rank 989; 2007 #10)
- TorrentPortal (Compete Rank 4,300 Alexa Rank 1,126; 2007 #7)
Did you enjoy this post? Why not check out:
- The Pirate Bay Verdict - The Last Kick of a Dying Horse
- Friday Fact Box - Digital Music
- Digital Rights Management - Downloads May Not Only be for Pirates
Interesting post.
...man, getting so nervous about the future of our P2P freedoms.
Posted by Damian Burke on 2009/05/15