New ipoque Survey Confirms the Continuing Boom P2P File Sharing

BitTorrent surpasses eDonkey and now generates more traffic in the German Internet than any other application

Munich/Leipzig, Germany, October 24, 2006 – P2P traffic generated by Internet file sharing is still on the rise in Germany. ipoque, provider of solutions for Internet traffic management and analysis, has conducted a survey on user behavior in the most popular file sharing networks during the last six months. The survey contains facts on the overall development of P2P traffic and detailed information on the type and amount of shared content. While current movies, music and computer games are still the most popular files, e-books and audio books have gained a high popularity too. Also, pornographic content still has a significant share.

P2P traffic still on the rise – with a 30% to 70% share of the overall Internet traffic

Depending on time of day, P2P traffic uses a share of 30% (daytime) and 70% (nighttime) of the overall Internet traffic in Germany. The absolute data volume has risen by 10% between June and October 2006. BitTorrent has surpassed eDonkey as the most popular file sharing network and causes more than half of all P2P traffic in Germany. Both networks generate over 95% of the P2P traffic and have nearly displaced previously popular networks such as Kazaa's FastTrack.

Videos by a wide margin generate most traffic

The survey is based on analysis of anonymous Internet traffic data collected at network level. The data represent about 100,000 households in Germany. The following diagram shows the content distribution for BitTorrent in Germany in October 2006.

As BitTorrent has been optimized for sharing large files, its traffic is dominated by videos and large software packages.

Wide spectrum: all media types are affected by file sharing

By looking at the number of shared files it becomes apparent, that small-volume content types such as e-books are massively shared, too. Music, movies, pornography and TV-series are the most often shared content types for BitTorrent. eDonkey's relative number of pornographic files is at 30% about twice as high as for BitTorrent.

Prediction: growing burden of Internet traffic by P2P usage

The ipoque survey proves the continuing popularity of Internet file sharing. Despite the many past campaigns by copyright holders, P2P usage has even grown.

With BitTorrent, a file sharing technology has been established that allows for virtually unlimited distribution of large media content. Thus, ipoque predicts a growing burden of the German Internet by P2P usage for the near future.