BitTorrent Has 100 Million Users

According to a press release, more than 20 million people are now accessing the file sharing service via the BitTorrent mainline and the µTorrent service. More than 400,000 clients are downloaded now every day.

“This is an exciting day for our team. Our vision is to build a complete technology ecosystem comprised of software, content and devices, designed to connect modern content creators with a massive digital audience,” said Eric Klinker, CEO at BitTorrent. “This milestone highlights the size of our user base and the power of our software.”

Founded in 2004, BitTorrent maintains the BitTorrent protocol, which is considered to be most popular file sharing technology for large files in use today. The protocol has consistently been named as one of the major consumers of Internet bandwidth with estimates ranging from about 30% to 60%. Several carriers are said to have established bandwidth throttling technology that especially targets BitTorrent and slows down file sharing processes.

Over the past five years, BitTorrent users have been targeted by movie and music industry organizations for copyright violations. In 2010 alone, 20,000 users were sued by the the U.S. Copyright Group, while the Recording Industry Association of America is estimated to have sued a total of more than 30,000 BitTorrent users.