Despite negative court verdicts against the two leading torrent sites, the BitTorrent popularity surge is still underway judging from ever increasing download figures. Mininova, the most visited BitTorrent indexer, broke an impressive record today. Since its inception, the site has served a dazzling 10 billion torrent downloads.

Mininova, founded in January 2005, grew out to become one of the most successful torrent sites with millions of daily users.

The site has grown steadily over the years and continues to do so, despite a setback in court this summer. In fact, today the 10 billionth torrent file was downloaded from Mininova, an impressive achievement to say the least.

Although the site is still going strong, with the increasing visitor numbers month after month, things have definitely changed behind the scenes.

When asked for a comment on whether they had predicted the site would grow this rapidly, Mininova co-founder Erik Dubbelboer told TorrentFreak: “We never really expected anything. We don’t really tend to focus on these numbers, we are just trying to run the site the best way we can.”

Previously the Mininova team welcomed these download records with more enthusiasm, but times have changed. In common with their counterparts at the Pirate Bay, we get the impression that the torrent site is not their core business anymore, which is not really that surprising considering the legal troubles Mininova faces.

In August, Mininova lost in court against Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. The judge ruled that the world’s largest BitTorrent indexer had to clean up its site and remove all torrents that link to infringing content. Mininova has yet to decide whether or not they will appeal the case.

Possibly related to this uncertain future, Erik said that they are not going to release any new features or major upgrades to the site anytime soon. “At the moment we are mainly focusing on other projects besides Mininova,” he informed us.

This year has undoubtedly been a turbulent one for Mininova. Nevertheless, we want to congratulate the Mininova team for reaching this new milestone, whether they like it or not.