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uTorrent Becomes Ad-Supported to Rake in Millions
- ojiikun 14y agoI can't claim that I was the first to have this thought, but I will post it to provide a possible positive counterpoint: If these adverts are for legitimate, legal torrents, their addition to the client could greatly increase the fraction of torrent traffic that is, well, legal. This would help put an end to the "all torrent traffic is illegal" argument for throttling and blocking used by ISPs and governments. So perhaps this is a ploy to make some advertising money, but with a subplot of ensuring torrents keep working the way they do.
- thirsteh 14y agoMillions? Doubt many of the users of the application care about ads, so unless they charge for impressions...
- rabidsnail 14y agoThey're probably running display ads, which are traditionally CPM.
- benologist 14y agoAds obviously work or TPB wouldn't fill their billions of pageviews a month with multiple units.
- sp332 14y ago... usually of the crappiest, lowest-paying ads. A lot of businesses don't want to be associated with TPB or some of the content on there so sometimes they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel.
- benologist 14y agoSurfTheChannel was rumored to make around $2000/day off just 400,000 daily visitors at its peak - TPB probably hasn't had traffic that low in years. http://torrentfreak.com/surfthechannel-owner-found-guilty-of-conspiracy-to-defraud-120627/ http://torrentfreak.com/surfthechannel-owner-found-guilty-of...
- sp332 14y agoEstimates vary wildly from $100,000/year to $1.4 million/year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay#Funding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay#Funding That's about $270/day to $3,800/day, although some of that is private funding as well as advertising.
- benologist 14y agoThat $100k is from 6 years ago .. so 6 years ago their lawyers admitted the site made (at least) $270/day and today it does probably at least one order of magnitude more traffic.
- dguido 14y agoThey didn't say the currency they're using. It's millions because it's all in Facebook dollars (effectively ~$5 USD total).
- autodidakto 14y agoMust be FB dollars if they can't manage to keep the lights on with 15-20 mil
- jamesjguthrie 14y agoTime to choose a new BitTorrent client.
- jdangu 14y agoMassive alienation of users through invasive ads is the beginning of the end.
- octopine 14y agoStarting with uTorrent "enhancing" their users' experiences with bundled adware: http://www.ghacks.net/2012/05/04/utorrent-update-comes-bundled-with-adware/ http://www.ghacks.net/2012/05/04/utorrent-update-comes-bundl...
- minm 14y agoHere is one alternative: http://www.tonido.com/app_torrent_home.html http://www.tonido.com/app_torrent_home.html. Manage your torrents from anywhere.
- sp332 14y agoThis seems like the perfect application for oldversion.com http://www.oldversion.com/uTorrent.html http://www.oldversion.com/uTorrent.html
- baddox 14y agoI've never understood why anyone who is tech savvy would use a closed-source BitTorrent client, especially if they plan on using it to commit copyright infringement. There are open source alternatives, like deluge (which is cross platform and has a remote client feature that's splendid) or rtorrent (a great little ncurses client for *nix).
- someperson 14y agoIt seems the author of rtorrent doesn't want to add highly important features like manual addition of trackers among other things. Deluge was buggy last time I used it (about a year ago). Lot's of potential though.
- w1ntermute 14y agoI use Deluge as my only client, accessing a Linux daemon instance of Deluge from a Linux client and a Windows client. The only issue I occasionally encounter are errors in the final download, but that's easily fixed by forcing a recheck.
- barbs 14y agoI believe there's a client called qttorrent or qtorrent that's meant to be an open source clone of utorrent. I've not tried it out though. [EDIT] Found it, it's http://www.qbittorrent.org/ http://www.qbittorrent.org/
- m_for_monkey 14y agoI'm using it extensively on Xubuntu and I think it's awesome. I can only recommend it. When reading the title, my first thought was to pimp it here...
- andrewfelix 14y agoI've been using uTorrent out of old habit. Thanks for putting me onto Deluge.
- lelandbatey 14y ago
- greenranger 14y agoThose wily scamps over at mackeeper should be all over this.
- uvTwitch 14y agoThanks for notifying me to not upgrade uTorrent.
- tuananh 14y agoi haven't upgraded since 2.0.4
- uvTwitch 14y agostarting to think I should've done the same.
- ditoa 14y agoYeah I am still on 2.2.1 as I did not like the changes they were making to the UI (thankfully just a few clicks changes it back to the old look). Never even installed 3.x
- kanzure 14y agoPlease remember to upload old binaries to the web for others to use.
- beloch 14y agoThey've hit a sticky spot. I'd much rather pay a couple dollars for ad-free software than use something with annoying ads in it. However, like most people I'd probably be illogically unwilling to suddenly pay for the same software I've been using for free. In the short-term I'll probably just avoid updating, but in the long-term I'll migrate to another torrent client! This is probably the beginning of the end for uTorrent.
- oakwhiz 14y agoµTorrent actually does provide a paid version: http://www.utorrent.com/utorrent-plus/ http://www.utorrent.com/utorrent-plus/
- cf0ed2aa-bdf5 14y agoThe feature list of the paid version does not mention removing advertisements though. Only virus protection, the ability to play more file types, transcoding and remote access.
- z92 14y ago"Only virus protection, the ability to play more file types, transcoding and remote access." Which I would rather pay to NOT have included in my version. I had been using microTorrent for what its name implied, for being micro. IIRC, the first torrent client was written in python. Then ported to Java. The first implementations where so bulky that people hated those. uTorrent probably was the first port in C and everyone loved it for being light weight. Hence the "micro".
- cf0ed2aa-bdf5 14y agoExactly, those features are the complete opposite of what µtorrent once set out to be: a lightweight torrent client.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- DigitalSea 14y agoLooks like it's time to give Deluge another try. uTorrent started out great then they started bundling in malware and now they're adding in advertisements - as if they need the extra cash in the first place.
- ianstormtaylor 14y agoWow. TorrentFreak has 48! bugs found with Ghostery. I think that is the highest I've ever seen. Speaking of a service that's supported by ads (and worse than ads).
- CrazedGeek 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BitTorrent_clients http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BitTorrent_client... If you feel the urge to switch. (I like Transmission -- clean, efficient, great as a daemon + web interface).
- huhtenberg 14y agoNo surprise here, really. uTorrent went downhill steadily after it got bought by BitTorrent. The original uT was beautiful in its well-thought minimalist design and lean code. The first thing BitTorrent did was they messed with the UI. Then started bundling some BS features like streaming, ratings and so on. And an elegant, simple, yet intricate piece of software started crumbling. I used to give uT as an example of really good software design and execution, but sadly it's no more... time for a rewrite it seems :)
- xentronium 14y agoTransmission is my go-to client on linux and os x. Very smallish and simple UI. I wonder if their port to windows [1] is usable. [1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/trqtw/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/trqtw/
- thronemonkey 14y agoTransmission is where its at. Can be controlled from a web interface and the command line to boot.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoTransmission's great. Came with Ubuntu, lets me download Torrents from magnet URIs, out of the way with no hassle. Or what mTorrent used to be (the greek m looks like a u, but isn't, and is pronounced "micro" for the SI prefix)
- gcr 14y agoAre you talking about µTorrent? If so, µ is pronounced "mu" or "mew"; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9C http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9C
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoAh, my bad. Its Wikipedia page is MTorrent though (uppercase)
- vasco 14y agoIn a perfect world the ads would be a small link right after the torrent title/name. The link would read "buy original" and would send you to a webpage with links to Amazon/Steam/other store where you would get to buy the original if you liked what you read/seen/heard/played. They could make some affiliate profit out of it too.
- smegel 14y agouT went crap after 3.1. I use an old 64 bit version of 3.0 - no ads and no plan to upgrade.
- alan_cx 14y agoEr, I thought it went crap after 1.6.1 !!!!!!! IIRC, and please forgive my terrible memory, something happened with ownership or the main programmer "selling out", which caused a lot of worry about privacy, etc. I believe that 1.6.1 was the last "safe" version in relation to that. And for years I stuck with 1.6.1 Whether or not is was utterly wasting my time, I really dont know!!!
- micheljansen 14y agoI've actually never used uTorrent myself, but I found myself quite appalled by the title and then slowly warming up to the ideas as I read the article. As I understand, the company behind uTorrent currently makes their money from people who install a browser toolbar bundled with the uTorrent installer. This is one of the sleaziest sources of revenue. Putting some ads in the app itself is at least honest. Even better, rather than having your average "Clean your computer now!" ads, they apparently plan to advertise using "sponsored torrents", from within a BitTorrent client. That's actually pretty clever! If they push this a bit more, they can use uTorrent as a trojan horse for a legitimate BitTorrent platform the way iTunes went from being an app to put music on your iPod to a full-blown music store. I'll defer my judgement until I see how this turns out, but it can hardly be worse than a browser toolbar.
- PaulHoule 14y agoif they get rid of that conduit.com BS I'll be happy
- RexRollman 14y agoWith that kind of money, I wonder how long it will take someone to sue them for "profiting from promoting piracy", even though they don't.
- SeppoErviala 14y agoWhy use proprietary adware when there are FOSS alternatives available?