uTorrent grows to 28 million monthly users
uTorrent, the preferred client for most BitTorrent users, has put together a strong database, since it was launched three years ago, one that continues to expand. Last year the number of BitTorrent proxies users doubled, and in 2008 it continued to grow, reaching 28 million monthly users
uTorrent saw its first appearance in public in September 2005. A year later, this lightweight client was acquired by Bittorrent Inc., which continued with the development of the application, recently introducing a Mac version.
Despite its popularity, until now it was not well known for the number of regular users of the client. Based on data from PC Pitstop, we reported in April that uTorrent was installed on 11.6% of all computers in Europe, compared to 5.1% in the US. However, the number of installations says little about the use of the application.
Trying to find out about the number of regular users of uTorrent, we decided to ask Simon Morris, BitTorrent Product Management manager, and he was willing to share some data with us. Morris told us that each month, 28 million customers were in active use. "Customer input has been constantly increasing during 2008," he told us, adding "Clearly the increase in demand for our freeware seems to be quite sustained."
In comparison, Morris said that Mainline, the second most popular client according to PC Pitstop, has 7 million monthly active users. More interesting perhaps, is that the uTorrent usage statistic gives us more perspective of the number of total Extratorrents users. If we know the portion of the market that uTorrent shares, we can make a fairly safe estimate of the number of active Bittorrent users each month.
Based on the crawler reports, the market percentage used by uTorrent is 40% to 60%, which means a figure of 50 to 70 million active monthly users. If we assume that 70 million is the number of active BitTorrent users, this means that it is close to 5% of all the people who are online on a monthly basis. An impressive number.
