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Mininova, 5 Billion Downloads and Counting

Today, one of Mininova’s users will will have the honor to download the 5 billionth torrent, an impressive figure for a site that has only been around for little over three years. If Mininova continues to grow at this rate, we might see the 10 billionth download before the year ends.

mininova logoMininova is currently the most visited BitTorrent site, and with approximately 3.5 million visitors a day, the site has gathered a spot among the 50 most popular websites on the Internet.

When we reported about the 3 billionth download back in November, Erik from Mininova told TorrentFreak: “We hope to reach the 4 billion mark in 4 or 5 months from now”. He didn’t have to wait that long, as it only took 78 days before they got there. The TV-show category remains the most popular, approximately half of all downloads from Mininova are torrents relating to TV-episodes.

The popularity of Mininova became apparent a few weeks ago when the site was offline for nearly a day because of hardware issues. The millions of visitors had to go elsewhere to feed their BitTorrent habit, and as a result, other sites like Torrentz.com and SumoTorrent saw a huge traffic increase, and almost went down under the strain.

The Mininova team will continue to optimize the site in order to handle the continuous traffic increase. On top of this, they are also adding new services and features such as a content distribution platform for independent publishers, a music streaming feature, and more recently, video streaming.

From the looks of it, Mininova’s growth will not be halted anytime soon, unless there is outside intervention. Last week, the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN announced that it will take legal action against the site, not to take it down, but to force it to filter copyrighted content. Erik from Mininova said in a response they “will proceed to court with full confidence,” and they will continue to serve torrents.


Mininova downloads since 2005.

mininova 5 billion

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  • Tom

    One of the best sites and still going strong well done.

  • Jam

    exponential

  • Jam

    Sorry but i want to ask you something ernesto didn’t you be tired to promote mininova.org, we don’t need one big site but several big sites. i think you need to promote new beginners than big sites. big sites are big enough. and promote more public trackers. indexers comes and indexers moves, what we need is trackers.

  • Anonymous

    @3
    Perhaps we need both.

  • TD123

    Congrats mininova

  • Almo

    Congratulations Mininova!

  • pja4008

    It all may be coming to an end very soon

  • port

    I agree that all this focusing on big numbers, although looking good interest-wise, isn’t much good news.
    It would be better with a more spread userbase, with several big public sites.
    I know there not only Mininova, I just hope it will stay that way.

  • RJ

    Shows how much effect the anti-piracy guys are having doesn’t it?

  • Pope

    #3 is right.

  • As An Industry Slowly Dies…..

    A new one quickly grows. :D

  • Anonymous

    If the others were as well layed out and and as easy on the eye as mininova they’d get more popular too. Most of them are just too ugly.

  • Anonymous

    @3

    You’re right, I agree with you, but there’s always gonna be a number one which will always warrent a mention.

    In fact we could begin mentioning up and coming sites right here right now.

    Does anybody have a personal recommendations? Preferably sites with open registration?

  • nomber

    Lol the torrent count on their site keeps going up and down when i refresh

  • Rycon

    He isnt promoting anything.. hes reporting news.. sure they get promo out of it but does the article say MININOVA IS AWSOME USE IT!! No it doesnt, they made a milestone.

    If you had rubbed your two brain cells together and thought about this I wouldnt of had to post this comment.

  • Dan

    @13

    Or in fact, why isn’t Jam using the opportunity to promote these sites in his/her post?

  • greg

    Actually, I’d love to see new sites mentioned on this site. Of course, stories are stories, but perhaps an occasional mention of “Something to look at” could be implemented(sp?) into TF as well.

    Hooray for Mininova.

  • Jam

    @15

    Lol, this news was reported one week ago (about mininova was down and brein). First, info about a successful commercial ad: A commercial advertisement doesn’t say “awesome use this product” they will just give positive sides of a product. However this is not a commercial advertisement, but this article shows a lot of positive sides of mininova, so it recommends (activate) people to take an action, example “go to mininova and download from there”. So you can see this article as an advertisement of mininova. I hope I have brought your two brain cells together. If your two cells have been brought together you will conclude that, the new bittorrent indexers and trackers have no chance to stand in www. And this is a big issue, if mininova has gone what will you do, or in general what will we do???
    Consequences = the small sites will be removed faster from www because they can’t hold; they have no money to stand etc. If we have a lot of mininova, we will win. And promoting one site (mininova) is a weakness.

  • skakidd

    wtf? you guys are weird theres a gillion trackers. why look for some little tiny unknown one when there are perfectly good giant sites.

    tpb, mininova, demonoid, and boxtorrents. there. why bother with the rest when these are up and running. if they go down LOL for a long period of time LMAO then maybe find something else but seriously…

  • flobber

    never used mininova, never had the need. TPB, Isohunt and demonoid fulfill my needs.

  • Anonymous

    @all of you criticizing this article:

    although it would be great for more trackers to grow to the success of such sites as mininova and TPB, there is certainly nothing wrong with supporting the success of the torrent giants. in fact, i would argue that we, as pirates, benefit from these giants. what better way to stick it to the RIAA than to show them that in spite of all the lawsuits and bullshit, mininova still has 5 billion downloads, and 3.5 million users per day. thats a lot of zeros.

  • John Doe

    stop the damn “my E-Penis is bigger than yours” crap mininova is popular and is the leader for torrent indexers it shows others what to do to get popular and how to do it IE be user friendly although i do agree somewhat this article is like the 100m mens races no one truly cares who’s the fastest its just nice to know what time he got so you can bring it up in some conversation to look smart in front of the girl/boy

    also it would be interesting to compare such torrent sites with the likes of rapidshare and megaupload (yes not all their content is movies and such but lets face it most of it is)

  • netuser123

    After seeing the stats , all I can say is…..’WoW’ !!!

  • Afri

    Awesome…
    All the best guys…

    Http://www.hack5.exofire.net

    Waiting for 10 billion…

  • LMZ

    mininova is great sh1t, not great thing! They don’t host .torrent files, so fuck them!

  • ZeroCooL

    .. If you guys want to check out something cool and Help promote a New Torrent based Forum Site.. Go to http://www.NikonXp.com .. They have all the Most Trusted Uploaders lined up in One category, and are Confirmed to be Real, No Fakes, No Spam, No Junk.. One of The Mininova Moderators Moxin is also a Moderator there as Well.. Cool site and Helpful and Friendly atmosphere, Plus there is a Popular Request Section where you can Drop in YouR request and They are Forwarded to the Trusted Uploaders to pick From.. I love it .. Big thanks to these guys who put so much work into helping us clear out all the Junk.. It’s only been up about 2 weeks and there are about 700 registered users.. Check it out and Hope this HElps. ZCooL

  • AddicT

    @ 26
    Thanks for the Recommendation. Just checked it out, nice Site.. Looks like they are still adding alot of Stuff, but definately has alot of Potential.. Props and respect

  • Ken Watts

    They don’t seem to have a big range of music. TV shows are a huge waste of bandwidth, as there are only a few good current shows, and most of the best older ones are unavailable.

    Of course, it may be what many want, but it means less or no sharing of good stuff. It’s a shame people couldn’t record their own shows instead of downloading them.

    This reflects the difficulty placed upon us by hardware mfrs and media industries who want to ban or discourage it.

  • Post Attempt #3

    It’s a good site but the torrent download numbers reported are hugely inflated a lot of the time, at least in my experience as a content seeder. It’s not uncommon to see figures for “Downloads:” exagerated by ~10x.

    They should check their systems are reporting correctly…

  • pwnonymous

    #3

    there are so many many trackers and are growing by the day. so many of them are immensely similar with about >1000 scene torrents that can be found on so many other sites. i don’t actually think we need more trackers right now (apart from perhaps a specialist classical music tracker and a specialist IDM tracker, that would rule!) there are generally plenty to fulfil everyone’s needs if people bothered to have a delve into private torrent sites (which aren’t hard to get into, it just takes a little perseverence sometimes).

    why would we need more than:

    - what/waffles/STm/funky etc. for music
    - TL/RevTT/ScT/etc. for scene stuff
    - goem/TehCon/KG/etc. for movies
    - Pianosheets/MGM for sheet music
    - Thebox/TVT/BMTV/etc. for TV
    - UG/BCG/BitG/etc. for games
    - pureTNA/pussytorrents/cheggit/etc. for porn
    - bitme/TBT/etc. for elearning
    - TPB/Demonoid/h33t for everything else
    - etc. etc. etc.

    i know there’s a load of categories and sites i’ve not mentioned but i’m not gonna spend all day on this post, but there really is a world of stuff out there already. i think we’ve got enough indexers and trackers to be getting on with.

  • ron burgandy

    @3 so true. More support is needed for those who have their own trackers, not just index others torrents. Torrentfreak needs to stop advertising pizzatorrent, torrentz and a million other search engines.

    Anon is correct too. Far too many sites are hard on the eye, black being a favoured (but sometimes impractical) colour

  • Oblivion_4

    For the love of god spellcheck your article. your grammar skills and lack of objectivity is why I don’t come here often

  • Anonymous

    I wanna see a graph with a trend line, see where we would be in the current growth in 3, 6 months and 1 year

  • Crandom

    its the graph of y = log x – 1

    exponential growth :)

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  • Crandom

    therefore, 10 billion d/l’s in 3 months!

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  • BAMBUCILLO.

    WOOWW.
    LONG LIFE, MININOVA.
    THX FOR ALL.

  • Pingback: Mininova pasó las 5 mil millones de descargas | XKOD

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  • Pingback: Lawsuit + 5 billion downloads at Mininova blog

  • frankie jay

    @ 3 mininova rules fuck the samller sites they just want the spot light and why start something thats already been done

    @ 25 eat a dick all day !

  • Anonymous

    I hope it isn’t going the same way as suppernova. that one grewe enormously and then f@#kt up. so i agree dont’let one site become to big then the autoritys wil hunt it down (like torrentspy. Good luck mininova and keep up the work.

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  • smegette

    way to go !!!!!! We need places like this to continue to thrive!

  • Eviltoe

    I agree Mininova is the dogs B****Ks

  • Pingback: Mininova hits 5 Billion Downloads!! | Don't Copy That Floppy

  • Simma

    Why don’t you people calling for new sites just check the trackers on mininova files? duuhhhhh -.-

    It’s astonishing how many people will use a resource and not poke around the details of it.

  • Zoness

    I love Mininova when theres stuff I can’t find on private trackers but we need more sites like mininova and more TRACKERS to actually host stuff on but hey still impressive!

  • Dude

    Scale free networks. That’s what it is. Read Linked by Barabasi.

  • Katalin

    OK!!!

  • BongWizard

    what the world needs is trackers… not pussy index sites who are too cowardly to give the authorities the big finger and run a tracker themselves… mininova is simply an advertising platform for worthwhile sites who have quality content.

    Im not baggin mininova’s success or anything, im just trying to say its unwarranted… mininova does not deserve its success… its simply stolen the well known suprnova name and turned it into a crock of shit monopolising a medium we all love because of its freedom… noww if thats not contradictory, i dont know what is.

    sure, mininova has LINKS to some great stuff… but the key word there is LINKS… that being so, the success of mininova is just a reflection of the success of BitTorrent itself.

    So stop idolising this leech of a website (im sure you can all relate to the disgust one should feel if i use that term) and join a good private tracker to support the people who bring you all the great stuff you can find on mininova (and i can guarantee youll get it faster too!)

    P.S. Ernoesto, quit quoting that statistic of mininova being in the Top 50 sites on the world… they were only ever there once and not for very long either (less than a day). I just checked your “credible source” (Alexa… very highly credible *end sarcasm*) and mininova is only ranked 52, so either check before you post lies (and hopefully correct them) or dont post at all… And you like to think of yourself as a journalist… for shame…..

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  • Anonymous

    public torrent sites are crap.

  • matador

    ooooh BongWizard you should take a freakin chill pill. Many of the best companies in the world were born out of OPP

    And as for journalist getting their facts right…need i go on, are you really that naive?

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  • Anonymous

    dont u think the guy who made mininova is so pissed that he didnt charge people for downloads, if he did he’d be a billionare

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  • MasterMan

    (dont u think the guy who made mininova is so pissed that he didnt charge people for downloads, if he did he’d be a billionare)

    I agree

  • john

    This site is really superb!!! Thank you for you work! Good Luckp

  • Siber

    Hi! Definitely nice and neat site you got there.a

  • Kathy

    I\’l be back… :)e

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