The peer-to-peer file sharing industry is quite important these days as ISPs, copyright holders and users are continuously talking about it. While consumers simply love P2P file sharing, copyright holders has strongly criticized it because it is rumored that the largest amount of pirated content is distributed by this method. Some ISPs encountered difficulties due to users' exaggerated appetite for P2P downloads and, even if some of them have thought to banning P2P tools, they are actually the solutions that bring consumers and obviously, money.

Getting back to users, it's obvious that P2P means something for them. But wouldn't be interesting to know which are the most popular P2P applications on the web and how many users installed it? Well, the people at Digital Media Desktop have made a report to analyze the evolution of the most important P2P clients, no matter on what network they work on.

The research was made on 1,661,688 computers in approximately one year and revealed that LimeWire is the most popular P2P client on the web, being installed on no less than 34.10 percent of the computers in September 2006 and on 36.40 percent in September 2007.

However, the most interesting duel is the BitTorrent competition which was won by uTorrent with 3.00 percent of the computers in September 2006 and 11.30 percent in September 2007. As you can see, uTorrent had an impressive growth in popularity although BitTorrent was previously more popular than it. BiTorrent was installed on 5.20 percent of the systems in September 2006 (more than uTorrent) and on only 4.60 percent in September 2007.

KaZaa, one of the applications which were quite popular in the past, slowly decreased its success rate from 4.50 percent of the systems in September 2006 to only 1.50 percent in September 2007.