Torrent search engine service Mininova.org has hit a major milestone. The company hit about 10 billion torrent downloads earlier this week. Mininova started in January 2005. “We never really expected anything. We don’t really tend to focus on these numbers, we are just trying to run the site the best way we can,” stated Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer in an interview with TorrentFreak.

Mininova is one of the largest websites for downloading torrents.  Mininova users can download movies and music legally or illegally.  Yesterday the site has broken two milestones.  The first milestone was that they broke 6 billion total torrent downloads.  The second milestone is that they served over 10 million downloads in one day. 

At the rate of 10 million downloads in one day, this means over 117.6 torrents were downloaded per second.  This past June, Mininova achieved 2 billion total downloads.  Mininova has been around for less than 4 years.  Most of Mininova’s downloads are for TV shows.  This is strange because most TV shows are available legally for free online.  Major TV studios CBS, NBC, FOX, The WB, and ABC all offer multiple ways to watch their shows.  But because many TV shows are starting new seasons, that explains why there has been this surge in traffic. 

Mininova operates out of Utrecht, The Netherlands at the Utrecht Business Park.  Mininova is working with premium publishers to distribute massive content for free.  Mininova currently serves close to 800,000 torrents. 

Mininova.org, the largest torrent listing website that started in January 2005, has hit a major milestone.  Currently over 3 million visitors go to Mininova everyday.  At the end of October, Mininova hit 3 billion downloads and is planning to keep the growth going.

We hope to reach the 4 billion mark in 4 or 5 months from now

stated Erik, a founder of Mininova.  In 2006, Mininova was the 9th Most Googled Word. The founders of Mininova also recently started a video website called Snotr.

Information Source:
[1] TorrentFreak.com: Mininova Breaks 3 Billion Downloads Barrier by Ernesto

Mininova is one of the largest BitTorrent search engines for all types of files available on the Internet from movies, to MP3s, to books on PDF. As many people know, BitTorrent technology was written by Bram Cohen and is becoming very popular. µTorrent is the mainstream software that is used to download torrents and was acquired about a month ago.

TorrentFreak.com, a blog that focuses mostly on Bittorrent updates had a chance to exclusively interview Niek, a founder of Mininova. When Niek was asked about when he first learned about BitTorrent, he stated that it was sometime in 2003 and Rob, another mininova staff members pointed out the new protocol. Niek then started building Mininova in December 2004 and the first public version was released on January 15, 2005.

Recently, a new version of Mininova was released and new features are being prototyped. Mininova runs on 13 servers, one being in the U.S. for forums and the Mininova staff has about 5 members. Mininova averages 2 or 3 removal requests from organizations promoting the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but Mininova is able to avoid removing content by pointing out Mininova’s copyright policy.

While downloading MP3s are mainly used through LimeWire, iTunes, MySpace, etc., torrents make downloading full MP3 albums easier similar to a .zip file, so many people have been turning to this service. Personally, I have not tried out the service myself, but I believe that this relatively new P2P protocol is here to stay and the MPAA or RIAA won’t be able to do much to stop its growth.
[Source: TorrentFreak]