LimeWire Not as Popular as Recent Reports Suggest
Written by Ernesto on December 28, 2007Today 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.
Previously: Movie Industry: DRM Is For Customers, Not For Members
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62 Responses (Add yours or TrackBack)
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Haven’t used it in years
I never used it. By the time I got broadband the time for BT had already begun.
Again with the rubbish 5%. Take download.com as a rough example of what people really are using from the total number of downloads per client.
Morpheus 5.5.1 171,718,771
BitComet 0.97 56,863,181
BitTorrent 6.0 13,317,960
Azureus 3.0.1.6 2,212,073
uTorrent 1.7.5 1,423,664
BitLord 1.1 1,244,464
I’d be more willing to accept those figures to be representative of what people have installed.
[quote comment="249696"]Again with the rubbish 5%. Take download.com as a rough example of what people really are using from the total number of downloads per client.
I’d be more willing to accept those figures to be representative of what people have installed.[/quote]
Well, you can only download Bitcomet and other apps from download.com. uTorrent is mostly downloaded from utorrent.com, and not included in the download.com stats ;)
If you look at Yahoo! Answers, it looks like every dumbass on Yahoo! has this trash installed.
Bittorrent is certainly the best when it comes to downloading larger files but I still find Limewire the quickest way to download individual songs.
[quote comment="249699"][quote comment="249696"]Again with the rubbish 5%. Take download.com as a rough example of what people really are using from the total number of downloads per client.
I’d be more willing to accept those figures to be representative of what people have installed.[/quote]
Well, you can only download Bitcomet and other apps from download.com. uTorrent is mostly downloaded from utorrent.com, and not included in the download.com stats ;)[/quote]
I realise that most people will be getting utorrent and azureus from their respective sites, but I still think the figures are somewhat representative of the popularity particularly betwen Azureus and utorent. If someone can come up for some figures from utorrent.com about their download stats that would be great. But I find it hard to believe that they’d beat 171 million. Azureus ranks 2nd (behind emule) for total sourceforge downloads to date with 158,351,685 downloads .That said, I think the figures for Morpheus also show that Limewire is not as popular as pehaps it once was. I always prefered Bearshare myself till iMesh got their grubby hands on it.
limewire gave me worms!!!
torrents are currently the best!
if i want individual songs i still use torrents or use google to download single songs.
My bad… I published the ARS article on ThePirateBlog…. :(
I’ll publish this too.
Limewire is monitored more any other P2P program, plus, theres that ’shared folder’ that anti pirites look for….mmmm after they have your IP your in deep doodoo…I won’t touch it…
man limewire rocks no doubt, but every time i run it ,it makes my PC run slower (usin 512 RAM).. so yeah i use Bittorrent (Bitcomet) and i can diselect other songs in a certain album and down the desired song only :)
it’s thaaaaaat simple!
I still find that Limewire sometimes has things that I can’t find a torrent for, and for smaller files (like single songs) it’s easier and faster. I like how it can automatically load the songs into iTunes as soon as they are downloaded.
I havn’t used any of that low quality gnutella tosh in years, I’d rather say that 38.5% of computers worldwide have some kind of p2p software installed, rather than just limewire.
Thats what you call short sighted journalism.
Limewire itself is trash. It’s coded in Java making it a brutal memory whore plus it is full of bugs and exploits. If you want to browse the Gnutella network get something like Shareaza or Phex (but thats still Java) or maybe even an older program like Gnucleus that allows you to browse both G1/G2. G1 is pretty much trashed as it seems it is currently among the most popular p2p networks. I personally like Ares for things that I used to download on Gnutella.
I think the story should be, the RIAA want Limewire to become more popular so it’s easier for them to view shared content.
I’ve used KaZaa, LimeWire, BearShare and Shareaza, and for me, Shareaza still rocks ass!
I only use 3 G1 connections (Shareaza can climb up too 5, which is why LimeWire pro claims to be faster) but I’m also connected to G2 (which doesn’t go faster by the amount of connections) and I still tend to get 200KiB/s (no, not Kb, but KibiByte)
A very good speed in my opinion for a rare metalsong!
ares 4 small files
i never used limewire, it came about after kazaa and was like a shitty version of it. soulseek has aways been the best in my opinion, next to private BT trackers ofcourse
No quality control = fail.
Yeah. In Shareaza’s G2, there’s a rating system. Much better to find quality :)
hey what about songspy? karma points? anybody?
Soulseek, anyone?
FROST WIRE ROCKS BABY !
I use WinMX and have never left it for any other client, sure I tested a few here and there but to be honest nothing I have seen offers what I can get on winmx, chat, files and friends, that plus it cant be shut down like many of the newer “controlled” networks the media cartels target.
Limewire is a very popular program with the youth of today whatever way you look at it, same with Utorrent, the fact is I dont know anyone using anything else.
The small memory footprint and ease of use ensures users dont need to waste time on what should be a simple operation.
In short while the original figures may be fiddled to make the userbase look bigger, is it not in our interests to look at the bigger interest of all file sharer’s?
Letting your blood boil over what client folks use to kick the cartels ass is lame, lets just be happy we have a diverse array of clients and an army of users.
Done Limewire, done torrent… Now’s the time for Servers (like RS.com), always maxing out the downloadspeed.
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