New data on the ever changing P2P landscape shows that the number of uTorrent users worldwide has more than doubled compared to last year. The BitTorrent client is most popular in Europe - with an install rate of 11.6% - and least popular in the United States, where 5.1% of the PCs have uTorrent installed.

The data presented here are based on a sample of over a million PCs (Windows only), and were gathered by PC Pitstop.

A few months we already reported that uTorrent overtook Azureus’ position as the most installed BitTorrent application, and this trend continues. LimeWire’s popularity on the other hand is declining worldwide. Nonetheless, it is still by far the most installed filesharing application.

LimeWire going down, uTorrent on the rise

From December 2006 to December 2007 LimeWire lost approximately 25% of its user base. By the end of 2007, 17% of all PCs in the United States had LimeWire installed, compared to 23.3% last year. Similar drops occurred in Europe, Latin America, and the rest of the world. The most loyal LimeWire users come from Australia, where the install rate is 27%, only a slight decrease compared to the 30.4% in 2006.

The uTorrent user base on the other hand is rapidly growing. uTorrent installs more than doubled in nearly every part of the world in the last 12 months. The BitTorrent client is most popular in Europe (11.6%), as can be seen from the graph below.

As a result of uTorrent’s growth, other BitTorrent clients such as Azureus and BitComet are going downhill. Azureus and BitComet now have an average install rate of 1.4% and 1.7% respectively.

Regional Differences

The regional differences in popularity of p2p applications are also worth mentioning. The data show that uTorrent is far more popular in Europe (11.6%) than in the United States (5.1%). Limewire on the other hand is well-liked among Aussies (27.0%) and Canadians (27.2%), but has less followers in Latin America.

Emule is still very popular in Latin America, where 16% of the PCs have the application installed compared to only 1% in the United States and 3% in Europe.

Home vs. Business PCs

Unsurprisingly, P2P applications are more frequently installed on home computers versus PCs at the workplace. Nevertheless, almost one out of five PCs at work (18%) have at least one P2P application installed. For home computer this is little over 1 in three (36%)

P2P Market share 2008

We also compiled a pie chart of the market share of the different P2P applications as of January 1st 2008. Please note that the data is a bit skewed since most of the data comes from participants who were based in the United States. LimeWire is without a doubt the winner here.

Finally, we want to make it clear though that install rates do not equal usage. The fact that someone installed a P2P client does not mean that they actually use it.

Based on the amount of traffic that is generated by each P2P application, uTorrent would be the absolute winner.