7 billion Mininova downloads in 2008

One of the biggest Bittorrent sites, Mininova, has seen the number of torrent downloads double from 3.5 billion to 7 billion during 2008. In 2008 Mininova also broke a new visitors record with 44.7 million unique visitors in one month.

Mininova predicts further growth in 2009 and feels that free content distribution will play an increasingly important role in the music and video industry in 2009. Mininova now has some 1000 independent content publishers who distribute their content via Mininova. However, the vast majority of files are still illegal copies, and they contribute most to the increase in traffic.

Anti-piracy organisation BREIN therefore argues that Mininova’s business model is illegal, since it is based around the provision of illegal content. Mininova profits from the illegal content through advertising on their site. It is likely that with the number of unique visitors, Mininova earns hundreds of thousands of euros per month.

It is highly questionable whether Mininova will continue to grow if the copyrighted content is no longer available to visitors.