uTorrent’s Popularity Boosts

The P2P scene is subjected to constant change – there’s new data indicating that the number of uTorrent users across the world has more than doubled since 2007, TorrentFreak reports.

The data we offer here were collected by PC Pitstop (the “subjects” of the study were more than a million PCs -Windows only-)

Some months ago uTorrent was surpassing Azureus as the most installed BitTorrent application, and it seems its ascension didn’t stop since while LimeWire has been suffering a decrease in popularity.

LimeWire descents as uTorrent goes up

The statistics published by TorrentFreak show that:

From December 2006 to December 2007 LimeWire lost approximately 25% of its user base. By the end of 2007, 17% of all PCs in the United States had LimeWire installed, compared to 23.3% last year. Similar drops occurred in Europe, Latin America, and the rest of the world. The most loyal LimeWire users come from Australia, where the install rate is 27%, only a slight decrease compared to the 30.4% in 2006.

On account of uTorrent’s constant growing, other BitTorrent clients like Azureus and BitComet are gradually losing ground. Currently, Azureus and BitComet enjoy an average install rate of 1.4% and 1.7% respectively.

The graph below shows The BitTorrent client as the most popular in Europe (11.6%)

What’s popular where?

Let’s address the matter of the regional differences in popularity of peer-to-peer applications for a moment; Studies reveal that uTorrent has far more fans in Europe (11.6%) than in the USA (5.1%). At the same time Limewire is preferred by Aussies (27.0%) and Canadians (27.2%), but doesn’t do that well in South America this being Emule’s territory where the program is installed on 16% of the computers compared to only 1% in the United States and 3% in Europe.

How P2P Market share looks like so far in 2008

Here’s another chart showing the market share of the different file-sharing programs since the beginning of this year (most of the data are gathered from US participants where LimeWire is undeniable the winner).

p2p marketshare 2008

However, we should clarify that install rates do not necessarily represent usage. Having a P2P application installed and actually using it can be a different thing.

Given the amount of traffic that each P2P client accounts for, uTorrent would be the one to sit at the top.