The data supplied by Evidenzia is in line with our own research earlier this year where we showed that 25% of the .torrent files on public BitTorrent trackers were movies. However, these statistics say little about the the popularity of the .torrent files and/or the number of people sharing the files, or for that matter what is defined as a movie (kvcd, Xvid, DVDr, and if adult content is included)
A more in-depth analysis that accounts for the number of people that actually share the files shows that TV-shows are far more popular. Close to 50% of all the people who use BitTorrent at any given point in time do this to download a TV-show, even though the number of available torrents are small compared to music or movies.
The popularity of TV-shows is enormous, series like “Heroes” and “Prison Break” are downloaded over a million times in any given week. This popularity hasn’t gone unnoticed, with some TV-studios allegedly use BitTorrent as a marketing tool, and others leaking unaired pilots intentionally.
Evidenzia also provides an interesting analysis of the number of files that have been released on BitTorrent since early 2004. The graph below shows that it’s at its peak right now – and even more impressive – the number of files released on BitTorrent nearly tripled compared to last year.
Together with the increase in torrents, most BitTorrent sites have noticed an increase in visitors too. Sites like Mininova, The Pirate Bay, and Torrentz more than doubled their traffic and there is no sign that this trend will be put to a halt anytime soon.
BitTorrent is here to stay.
