LimeWire Not as Popular as Recent Reports Suggest
Today several news sources again reported that 36.4% of all PCs have Limewire installed. The reports are based on a press release published by Digital Music News, who misinterpreted their own data. The acual install base is less than 18%, 17.92 to be exact.
Ars Technica published an article in which they quote the press release from Digital Music News, and report that one third of all PCs have Limewire installed. This article was later picked up by Digg, Slashdot and several other news sources. However, as we have reported before, this figure is incorrect.
It turns out that Digital Music News report is based on data which was collected by PC Pitstop. Unfortunately Digital Music News has trouble interpreting their own data. They claim in their press release that it is 36.4%, but that is the market share compared to other P2P clients. This means that on all PCs that have a P2P client installed, 36.4% installed Limewire
The actual install base of Limewire is less than 18%, still impressive, but not even close to one third of all PCs. Nevertheless, LimeWire is still the P2P application that is installed on most desktop computers. In comparison, with an install rate of more than 5% on Windows PCs worldwide, uTorrent is now by far the most popular BitTorrent client.
TorrentFreak contacted Digital Music News’s Paul Resnikoff two weeks ago about this issue and he told us: “I think you’ve definitely caught an error in our reporting. We’ll be issuing corrections on this. Thanks for the assistance.” So far, the initial reports haven’t been corrected, and this blunder is published as fact over and over again.
For those who are interested, here you can find the raw data where the report is based on.
