14 DAY TRIAL // Websites advocating the legalization of P2P networks that (occasionally) promote copyrighted content have started to speculate that BitTorrent trackers will soon manage to top giant search engines and websites, as far as the number of users goes. Thomas Mennecke, founder of the Slyck News site, draws a comparison between the traffic registered by Mininova, a BitTorrent tracker, and the websites of some companies that have gained popularity throughout years of hard work and intelligent strategies.
At the moment, according to the interpretation Mennecke gives to the stats presented by Mininova on its website, the BitTorrent tracker has the same audience as, say, eBay. Other popular online markets or social networks, such as Amazon.com and Facebook, fall behind Mininova, which once again emphasizes the fact that P2P is probably the most clever invention since television.
Although, right now, Mininova can't even dream of competing with Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft, its audience is not far behind the one registered by the Ask network or by AOL. The author of the aforementioned article even speculates that, as the number of users for the two properties is continuously decreasing, Mininova (or other websites of the kind) will catch up or even top them in almost no time at all. A comparison between the popularity of Ask.com with its affiliates and AOL, as registered in June, shows that, at least in the US, the companies behind them should not worry about what Mennecke claims will happen in the near future.
TorrentFreak, the news website that has shown, so far, a certain inclination towards the activities of any P2P-related website, backs up said theory which has it, in more or less these exact words, that BitTorrent trackers will take over the Internet world, sooner or later. “The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt combined achieve over a billion pageviews a month. These are quite remarkable statistics when you consider that together, the trio run less than 100 servers (cf. Facebook has 10,000).” reads a recent article posted on the website.
At any rate, the soaring popularity level of such websites is a thing of the present. Nevertheless, in their case, what we’re dealing with is a niche audience, which is, by definition, limited, even if it registers spectacular periods of growth from time to time.