uTorrent Becomes Ad-Supported to Rake in Millions | Hacker News Reader

uTorrent Becomes Ad-Supported to Rake in Millions

torrentfreak.com

72 pointstomse63 comments

No 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 :)

Transmission 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/

Transmission is where its at. Can be controlled from a web interface and the command line to boot.

Transmission'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)

Are you talking about µTorrent? If so, µ is pronounced "mu" or "mew"; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9C

Ah, my bad. Its Wikipedia page is MTorrent though (uppercase)

Streaming is an absolutely essential feature of uTorrent and is the only reason to still use it (well, maybe not after the scene shifted away from XVID and to mp4). Let's spare the discussion of whether or not it is healthy for the torrent; its plenty fine on torrents already well seeded.

Are there any other torrent apps that offer comparable streaming or front-loading of specific files. I've tried a couple abandoned open-source options but they were absolutely unusable.

qBittorrent [1] can download pieces in sequential order.

[1] http://www.qbittorrent.org/

Most clients don't allow this option as it makes the network less efficient. The swarm is efficient due to the fact that users download the pieces randomly and therefore are able to re-seed pieces that a low percentage of other users have.

Do you know of any research on this? It seems intuitive, but it'd be interesting to look at the numbers, simulated or not.

It's not random. Clients generally download the rarest pieces first. That way, the torrent is less likely to break when the swarm disappears.

If everyone downloads the most popular pieces first, then as the swarm shrinks, clients will soon only have pieces that everyone else has and nobody's downloads would finish.

The essence of uT is its ability to download. In that I'm perfectly fine with uT supporting in-order downloading, but any content-specific functionality is a feature bloat. It's a slippery slope that it is just all too easy to follow.

I suppose everyone interested in a good uTorrent client already got v2.2.1 (or even v1.x) installer for future use and won't switch from it in the next decade, so it's perfectly reasonable to create new Vuze from version 3.x for everyone else. You see, people even call streaming - "essential" :).

IIRC, old versions like 1.6.1 were single exe files.

I'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).

It 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.

I 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.

I 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/

I'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...

I've been using uTorrent out of old habit. Thanks for putting me onto Deluge.

The best client that I have used so far is by far Transmission for *nix systems. I learned about it when I got my first mac, and now it makes for a lovely headless seedbox.

The web UI is also really nice and simple.

I think the reason I use Transmission over rtorrent is that it seems to allow you to "eat" stuff that you put in a blackhole, which is rather nice.

Wait what?

I consider myself relatively tech savvy but I never heard of deluge. Thanks for that info.

Deluge would probably be helped by making it dead easier to download like uTorrent.

utorrent > Go to utorrent.com, site automatically figures out what OS I have > click download button to save it.

deluge > Go to deluge-torrent.org > click on download button > select operating system > go to a different subdomain/domain altogether to figure out which version to download.

Try qbittorrent. It's really nice.

They'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.

µTorrent actually does provide a paid version: http://www.utorrent.com/utorrent-plus/

The 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.

"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".

Exactly, those features are the complete opposite of what µtorrent once set out to be: a lightweight torrent client.

  > I'd much rather pay a couple dollars for ad-free
  > software than use something with annoying ads in it.

It's a torrent client. If you're willing to pay money for a nicer experience, then you're not in the target audience.

I'm willing to pay money for a nicer experience with movies, but I can't. Presently, that experience - no ads, no DRM and instant access - is only available for free.

Completely agree + IMHO it's insane to give money to the entertainment industry, provided it will use part of them to bribe politicians, destroy freedom, establish totalitarian control over Internet and PC platform.

In 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.

Massive alienation of users through invasive ads is the beginning of the end.

Starting with uTorrent "enhancing" their users' experiences with bundled adware:

http://www.ghacks.net/2012/05/04/utorrent-update-comes-bundl...

I'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.

This seems like the perfect application for oldversion.com http://www.oldversion.com/uTorrent.html

Wow. 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).

Thanks for notifying me to not upgrade uTorrent.

i haven't upgraded since 2.0.4

starting to think I should've done the same.

Yeah 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

Please remember to upload old binaries to the web for others to use.

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).

Looks 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.

I 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.

uT went crap after 3.1. I use an old 64 bit version of 3.0 - no ads and no plan to upgrade.

Er, 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!!!

With 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.

Millions? Doubt many of the users of the application care about ads, so unless they charge for impressions...

They're probably running display ads, which are traditionally CPM.

Ads obviously work or TPB wouldn't fill their billions of pageviews a month with multiple units.

... 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.

SurfTheChannel 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...

Estimates vary wildly from $100,000/year to $1.4 million/year 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.

That $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.

They didn't say the currency they're using. It's millions because it's all in Facebook dollars (effectively ~$5 USD total).

Must be FB dollars if they can't manage to keep the lights on with 15-20 mil

Why use proprietary adware when there are FOSS alternatives available?

Time to choose a new BitTorrent client.

if they get rid of that conduit.com BS I'll be happy

Here is one alternative: http://www.tonido.com/app_torrent_home.html. Manage your torrents from anywhere.

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