Monthly Archive for February, 2008

4 billion downloads!

Published on February 18, 2008 in Mininova-related news. 239 Comments

We’ve got great and exciting news! Mininova passed the 4 billion (4.000.000.000) torrent downloads mark today :)

It’s nice to see that the download counter continues to speed up: after reaching 3 billion downloads back in November 2007, we expected to reach the current number only in March or April.

For the sake of clarity: our download counter represents the number of times a .torrent file is downloaded from Mininova, this is not identical to the number of times a peer completes the download.

Some additional statistics for those who’re interested: our Alexa rank is currently 54, and Google Analytics shows that more than 32 million unique visitors used Mininova last month. These people together generate more than 510 million pageviews per month, which causes quite some pressure on our servers. We do whatever we can to minimize downtime and add extra servers when necessary.

Thanks to everyone who helped us to accomplish this! Special thanks go to our moderating team, who did and do a marvelous job.

As always: stay tuned, more big news is coming up very soon.

Press coverage: Slyck, ZeroPaid, AfterDawn, TechRadar, TechDigest, ITavisen (Norwegian), TorrentFreak, DSLreports

Cool new features + toolbar

Published on February 9, 2008 in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news. 48 Comments

Hi all,

We’re excited to announce several new (and in our opinion, very cool) features! Let’s kick off:

Streaming of distributed music torrents

Screenshot of music streaming

In close cooperation with the guys from BitLet, we added a “stream this music” button to torrents containing music (MP3/OGG Vorbis) files (example). This feature allows you to play the music right in your browser, without the need to download the content with a BitTorrent client. Note that this feature is only enabled on distributed (featured) torrents. Artists who’re interested in this feature: sign up for our free Content Distribution service.

Updating seeds/leechers statistics

Screenshot of statistics updating
This one was on top of the list of requested features. Our scraper system updates all torrent statistics several time a day. Many people think this is not enough, so we added an “update” button. With just one click, the statistics are up-to-date again. Note that this feature is only available for registered users, and there’s a time constraint per user and per torrent.

Tracking your comments

This is a nice feature for our active commenters. We already had the my torrents page, and now there’s also my comments. Did you forget where you left a comment? Just check out this page to find it back.

Mininova toolbar

Screenshot of the Mininova Toolbar
Last, but absolutely not least, we’re happy to announce the Mininova Toolbar. This toolbar (available for Firefox and Internet Explorer, Windows/Linux/Mac) is the perfect way to stay in touch with Mininova. The toolbar features integrated RSS feeds, category browsing, quick shortcuts and of course torrent searching in your browser. Give it a try: the toolbar is absolutely spyware/adware free!

Do you miss some features? Or have you got an awesome idea? Please let us know, and we’ll look into it :)

Thanks!