Mininova Hits 4 Billion Torrent Downloads

The Pirate Bay had charges filed against it late last month. But the RIAA needs to remember that while The Pirate Bay seemingly gets all the press, there are two juggernauts in the BitTorrent field, and the other is Mininova.

While The Pirate Bay earns headlines as the world's largest tracker, Mininova does a better job of indexing torrents and returns much better search results than The Pirate Bay.

On Feb. 18th, Mininova announced its 4 billionth download: that's billion with a B. To be clear, however, Mininova isn't counting the number of files successfully completed by a peer, but rather the number of torrent files downloaded.

Still, that's a huge milestone, and the numbers have been accelerating. It took nearly two years for Mininova to reach 1 billion, on January 8th of 2007. Then, on June 13th, they reached 2 billion. Finally, on November 1st, 3 billion downloads. So this last billion took only 3 1/2 months to reach as opposed to the approximately 5 months each for the last two billion download milestones.

More stats from the Mininova blog post:

Some additional statistics for those who’re interested: our Alexa rank is currently 54, and Google Analytics shows that more than 32 million unique visitors used Mininova last month. These people together generate more than 510 million pageviews per month, which causes quite some pressure on our servers. We do whatever we can to minimize downtime and add extra servers when necessary.

With those type of pageviews, had to be good for the bottom line. Of course, when asked about that by TorrentFreak, Mininova wasn't too forthcoming about that - but why should they be?

Dibs on a pool for when the RIAA goes after Mininova?