Mininova, one of the world's most visited BitTorrent sites, broke another download record today. Just a few hours ago the download counter displayed a staggering 8,000,000,000 downloads. That's enough for everyone on planet earth to have one - and then some.

Founded in January 2005, Mininova quickly became one of the most successful torrent sites. With millions of daily users the site is now listed among the top 100 most frequently visited websites on the entire Internet, and its traffic still continues to grow.

When combined, Mininova’s visitors have been downloading well over 10 million torrents a day and performing an equal number of searches on the site. These millions of downloads add up quickly and since the birth of the site a massive 8 billion torrents have been downloaded by Mininova users.

Mininova’s growth rate is not reducing either, and the site still has several relatively untapped and upcoming markets to look forward to. India for example, where torrents are quickly gaining popularity. Over the past year the number of visitors to Mininova from India has doubled, and with 1.1 billion people and only a couple million broadband subscribers to date, there is a huge amount of untapped potential.

In common with fellow torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt, Mininova hasn’t been spared from legal troubles. The site will appear in court this May, where the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN will demand a filtering mechanism to restrict access to copyright infringing ‘links’.

The Mininova trial is likely to set an important precedent for all other BitTorrent indexers hosted in The Netherlands. Erik and the other Mininova founders think they have the law on their side. “We have confidence in the outcome of the case and we don’t think Mininova will cease to exist,” he told TorrentFreak earlier.

In the meantime, Mininova continues business as usual in their new office. Lately they have been emphasizing the legal use of BitTorrent currently employed by hundreds of independent filmmakers and musicians. In March the site released a new feature that aims to help artists to not only distribute, but also monetize their work.

Whatever the outcome of the trial will be, Mininova will undoubtedly see the 10 billionth torrent download later this year.