In the years that followed the original BitTorrent mainline client was gradually transformed into a rebranded version of uTorrent, and today BitTorrent Inc. announced that both clients combined now have more than 100 million active users a month. Users literally come from all over the world, with 20 million active daily users from over 220 countries.

“This is an exciting day for our team. Our vision is to build a complete technology ecosystem comprised of software, content and devices, designed to connect modern content creators with a massive digital audience,” BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker said. “This milestone highlights the size of our user base and the power of our software.”

BitTorrent Inc.’s acquisition of uTorrent is without doubt the best decision the company has ever made. Where other projects such as the “movie store” and CDN-services failed miserably, uTorrent’s popularity kept on growing.

The irony is that the company which founded one of the most innovative technologies on the web in the last ten years, has not managed to build a new business model around it. Perhaps the BitTorrent powered movie store and CDN were ahead of its time, but the fact is that the company now relies on a toolbar to pay the salaries of its employees.

While there is no shame in relying on toolbars to keep million of BitTorrent users satisfied with an entirely free experience, we can only assume that the company had a greater plan in mind when it was founded back in 2004. That said, toolbars do bring in some serious money.

In addition to the millions of daily active users, the BitTorrent Mainline and uTorrent client are downloaded by 400,000 people a day according to BitTorrent Inc. An unknown percentage of these new downloads also choose to install the toolbar, which is good for millions of dollars in revenue a year.

This stable stream of revenue ensures that BitTorrent Inc. can continue the development of uTorrent in the future, and that’s a welcome message to at least 100 million BitTorrent users. TorrentFreak congratulates BitTorrent for reaching this impressible milestone, and we’re eager to see how far this number can increase in the future.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Due to its similarities with uTorrent, this smaller brother makes an ideal platform for testing new features in the wild – features that will eventually appear in uTorrent as well. Thus far this opportunity hasn’t really been put to use as most of the Mainline features have been lagging behind uTorrent. Today, however, this changes as BitTorrent Inc. has decided to first launch the ‘Apps’ platform in the release candidate of the Mainline 7.1 client.

BitTorrent Apps is a web-based extensions framework to add new functionality without compromising the lightness of the core BitTorrent client. Similar to other apps, addons and extensions in today’s web browsers and phones, the Javascript-based Apps will allow 3rd party developers to create applications that will integrate seamlessly with the client. They can be added to the client with a single click and are displayed using an embedded browser window.

Thus far the Apps have only been available to a relatively small group of uTorrent users, those who downloaded the experimental ‘Griffin‘ client. This means that today’s release will be the first real test for the platform, as it will open up to an audience of more than twelve million users. It is likely that BitTorrent Inc. chose Mainline for the initial release as a final test before the Apps are added to the regular uTorrent client which has over 50 million users.

The Apps ‘store’ launches with 11 Apps that are featured in the client, but developers can make their own apps available on external sites as well. While the platform is open, BitTorrent Inc. is curating the Apps that will be featured in the client. Most likely this means that Apps which promote copyright infringement will be barred from being featured.

The word ‘store’ might not be the best term to describe the Apps section today, but this might change. All the Apps promoted in the client are currently free, but BitTorrent Inc. isn’t ruling out the possibility of paid Apps.

“We can’t rule out someday creating an official commerce platform for developers to use if they choose, however, with many in-app payment systems available to developers today, it’s not the priority. The priority is to create a truly unique and integrated experience so our users can add awesome new functionality,” BitTorrent Inc. told TorrentFreak.

For BitTorrent Inc. the Apps platform opens up some interesting possibilities to generate additional revenue. Commercial affiliate deals and potentially paid Apps could become a significant revenue stream aside from the toolbar installs the company makes most of its income from now.

At this point, however, it is hard to see where the Apps platform will go. With only 11 available Apps there is not much value yet. The success of the platform will therefore depend on what developers come up with, and how useful these Apps will be to BitTorrent users. Time will tell.

Starting today the first release candidate of BitTorrent Mainline 7.1, including the Apps, is available for download on BitTorrent.com. The final version is expected to be released in a week or two.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Today we present a more robust report based on data from over 150,000 unique users in more than 400 public BitTorrent swarms. The data for this BitTorrent client comparison is collected by a researcher known as ‘xXx’ of the Tribler P2P research team at Delft University of Technology. The research team will continue to supply TorrentFreak with bi-monthly updates so we can discover new trends and shifts in the usage of the different clients.

The results in the table below give the market share for each individual client. Only 5 clients reached the 1% threshold, the remaining 19 that were encountered are grouped in the ‘other’ category. Some clients were not identified by libTorrent (rakshasa) and those ended up the the unknown ‘category’.

Both uTorrent and the third placed mainline client are developed by BitTorrent Inc, meaning that the company holds an impressive two thirds of the market. The only main contender at the moment is Vuze, formerly known as Azureus, with nearly 17 percent. BitComet, which used to be a major contender, is in fourth place with just 6.5 percent.

The data also gives us more insight into the size of the BitTorrent ‘network’. In December we reported that uTorrent had 28 million unique users a month, and based on this figure that might have grown even higher in the recent months. It is safe to say that there are roughly 50 million active BitTorrent users on the Internet.

It will be interesting to see how the market share of the clients changes over the coming months. Will uTorrent be able to keep its dominant lead? What will happen to Transmission’s market share when they release their Windows version? Will there be any new clients to compete with the top three? Lots of questions that we hope to answer in the future.

Stay tuned!

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.