uTorrent Has Banned ‘Sexy’ NSFW Ads This Year, And More

utorrent-logo-newWith more than 150 million active users a month uTorrent remains the leading torrent client.

While the software hasn’t seen any major overhauls this year, the team behind the software has not been idle. This week uTorrent’s director of product management, Jordy Berson, gave an overview of their accomplishments.

Living up to its ‘micro’ name Berson says that uTorrent has shrunk in size, again. At the same time, however, the team was quick to respond to a critical DDoS vulnerability reported by researchers a few months ago.

“µTorrent got smaller and more efficient. µTorrent developers were on the front lines of addressing security vulnerabilities identified for the wider libutp-based community,” Berson writes.

The uTorrent team also reports a dramatic decrease in crash rates as well as other fixes and smaller updates.

“We improved stability and performance with a series of changes that further reduced crash rates. We fixed bugs when they appeared and tweaked the small features you asked us to address.”

The graph below shows a 50 percent decrease in the number of application crashes when comparing the old and new stable releases.

uTorrent crash rates

utorrentcrash

Several other updates and improvements have also been made on the monetization size of the application. Earlier we reported that the popular BitTorrent client serves billions of ads per month.

However, the hated and loved NSFW variants were dropped this year.

utorrentdate“While some may miss these ads, we’ve raised our ad standards for our advertisers to deliver higher-quality safe-for-work ads,” Berson notes.

In addition to banner advertising the uTorrent client also generates revenue through bundled software, and the team has made several improvements on this end as well. This likely means avoiding another Bitcoin miner fiasco.

The uTorrent team is very conscious of how its monetizing strategies are perceived by the public and recently announced the exploration of alternative options, including direct financial support from users. These and other SFW changes appear to be still on the table for 2016.

“There have been some baby steps and some bolder steps. But we’ve done it all with our users in mind and we’ll continue in this direction throughout 2016,” Berson concludes.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.


Source: TorrentFreak

‘Game of Thrones’ Most Pirated TV-Show of 2015

got5Game of Thrones has the honor of becoming the most downloaded TV-show for the fourth year in a row.

With an estimated 14.4 million downloads via BitTorrent, the 2015 season finale has beaten the competition by a landslide.

More than half of the downloads occurred in the first week after the show aired and the total exceeds the number of traditional viewers in the US. The Walking Dead and Big Bang Theory complete the top three with an estimated 6.9 and 4.4 million downloads respectively.

Pirates have shown an increase in interest for higher quality releases compared to earlier years. However, the lower quality 480p copies of TV-shows remain by far the most popular among downloaders, followed by 720p and 1080p respectively.

Game of Thrones’ top listing doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Earlier this year it broke an all-time piracy record when more than 258,131 peers shared the same torrent file simultaneously.

Overall there is no sign that TV-show piracy is declining, on the contrary. The download numbers for the most popular shows continues to rise, sometimes exceeding the number of traditional viewers in the US.

Below we have compiled a list of the most downloaded TV-shows worldwide (single episode) for 2015, together with the traditional ratings in the US. The download numbers are estimated by TorrentFreak based on several sources, including statistics reported by public BitTorrent trackers.

Online streaming and downloads for file-hosting services are not included since there are no public sources to draw data from. Total piracy numbers will therefore be significantly higher.

Most downloaded TV-shows on BitTorrent, 2015
rank show est. downloads est. US TV viewers
torrentfreak.com
1 Game of Thrones 14,400,000 8,110,000
2 The Walking Dead 6,900,000 15,780,000
3 The Big Bang Theory 4,400,000 18,300,000
4 Arrow 3,900,000 3,920,000
5 The Flash 3,600,000 4,010,000
6 Mr. Robot 3,500,000 1,750,000
7 Vikings 3,300,000 5,010,000
8 Supergirl 3,000,000 12,960,000
9 The Blacklist 2,900,000 10,110,000
10 Suits 2,600,000 2,380,000

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.


Source: TorrentFreak