The best seeded torrent is an ad ran by BitTorrent, the company

Jul 8, 2013 18:41 GMT  ·  By

BitTorrent has never had it easy. Since the tool is often used by pirates, plenty of companies have fought against it, even though the technology itself is neutral. Even now, BitTorrent is regularly slowed down by ISPs, though mostly because it eats up so much traffic.

Still, BitTorrent continues to grow. TorrentFreak managed to get a pretty good set of data on how popular BitTorrent is these days – fitting, since the technology celebrated its 12th birthday last week.

Based on data from the three largest public BitTorrent trackers, there are a total of 4,508,514 torrents out there. On any given day, there are about 30 million people sharing them, though the number varies from day to day by a few million.

On the particular day TorrentFreak looked at, there were 29,414,471 people using BitTorrent via three big trackers, namely OpenBitTorrent, PublicBitTorrent, and Istole.it.

Of those, 22,258,311 were seeding at least one torrent, so the ecosystem is fairly healthy. That said, most torrents don't have that many seeders or that many people downloading them.

In fact, the vast majority of them, 4,133,225, had less than 10 peers. Some 387,534 torrents had between 10 and 100 peers, enough to ensure their survival. Only a few torrents are truly popular. For example, 30,301 have between 100 and 1,000 peers, which would certainly qualify them as popular.

But pushing beyond that is much harder. Only 1,249 had between 1,000 and 10,000 peers, and only 28 had over 10,000 but less than 20,000. Four torrents had as many as 30,000 peers and only one had over 30,000.

Of course, peers alone don't mean much; it's seeders that all torrents need. In this department, apparently, being featured by BitTorrent in uTorrent helps the most. The most seeded torrent out there is an ad for "SpeedUpMyComputer" with 27,599 seeds and just 96 leechers.

The torrent with the best ratio of seeders to peers was another promotion by BitTorrent, the Kaskade promo bundle, with 18,141 seeders and just 20 leechers, giving a ratio of 907.05.