November last year saw Mininova breaking into Alexa’s list of the 50 most visited websites on the Internet, which is an amazing achievement in just 36 months . Close to 5 billion torrents have been downloaded already, and with the torrents, the numbers of visitors continues to grow.

Here is a comparison between Mininova’s traffic last month, and a year before that.

March 2007

57,605,816 visits
261,460,196 pageviews

March 2008

109,304,822 visits
530,181,594 pageviews

Mininova’s visitors literally come from all over the world, Google analytics even reports 63 visits from the Vatican and 12 from Antarctica. However, most of the visitors come from the United States, followed by the UK, France, Canada and Australia.

Other BitTorrent sites are seeing similar visitor boosts but in terms of traffic, Mininova is definitely leading the pack. TorrentFreak spoke with Niek, one of the founders of the site, and he sees opportunities to grow even further.

“We expect that Mininova will at least sustain its current number of visitors. As BitTorrent and P2P in general become more and more accepted by the general public, new users will find their way to Mininova and other torrent search engines,” says Niek. “What Google has done for the web, we try to accomplish for BitTorrent and P2P.”

As a result of the increased popularity, Mininova had to upgrade their hardware numerous times. Unfortunately the current setup still has some weak spots. Yesterday Mininova went down for over 12 hours due to hardware issues.

“The extensive downtime of the last few days was a result of very unfortunate accidents, namely a crashing hard disk and a failing network card of the load-balancer in combination with two successive holidays in The Netherlands. We will do our utmost to prevent such issues in the future,” Niek said.

We wish them all the best and will keep you informed when their traffic has doubled again.

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

It is hard to tell if these sites will ever stop growing, and if they will ever make it into the top 100 without one of them going down, but we’ll see what the future brings. Isohunt, the site that bumped the other sites into the top 200, is currently moving their servers from The USA to Canada, and will probably be up and running soon.

Note: Alexa’s data gathering is quite dubious. The exact figures may be not be completely accurate, but it is a great tool (especially the traffic rank) to compare sites within the same niche and to get a global impression of traffic shifts over time.

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

(link to the powerpoint presentation)

Country P2P Preferences

What do people share?

So what do people share?

61,4 percent video
11,3 percent audio
27,2 percent is games/software/etc.

Note that in general video files are larger on average, so people don’t download more video’s, it just generates more traffic.

The average filesize of shared files is 1 gigabyte

What about the Traffic?

As you can see, by the end of 2002 (when BitTiorrent was created ;) ) P2P became responsible for more than 50% of all the traffic on the net.

And p2p traffic continued to grow:

In 2004 1 CacheLogic-server registered 3 million IP-addresses in 30 days
In 2006 1 CacheLogic-server registered 3 million IP-addresses in 8 days

This indicated that the users of p2p networks increased almost 400%

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

“I’m not convinced that it causes network congestion at this point, but clearly it has the potential to do that,”

He looked at Qwest’s peering points to get an idea of how much P2P traffic is on its networks. And, while he admits that it’s not an exact measurement of the P2P traffic load, he says the fears of network congestion are a little overblown.

“I… found that the traffic is well under what some in that industry say is happening. I mean, you hear claims of significant double-digit penetration of peer-to-peer traffic, and it was not near there,”

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