BitTorrent traffic up 24 percent since November

Unfortunately, people are discovering The Pirate Bay and a whole host of other sites. Even as the MPA, MPAA, IFPI, and other groups have scored legal victories over torrent sites, BitTorrent use is growing. In fact, average BitTorrent traffic for the two-month period from mid-January to mid-March was up almost 25 percent compared with the month before Christmas, according to online media measurement firm BigChampagne.

"All of the P2P growth we've seen over the past several months is in the torrent community," BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland told Ars. "There's a lot of adoption and interest in the torrent clients." Some of the growth in BitTorrent may be coming from from those growing tired of LimeWire and other traditional P2P networks, but those new to P2P seem to be jumping on the BitTorrent bandwagon. "All of the growth is in the torrent community, which maybe suggests that the audience for traditional P2P is mature."

As you can see from the chart above, BitTorrent traffic spiked over the December holidays. After a peaking at almost 12.5 million downloaders on the 200 most popular files, traffic dropped at the beginning of January—about the time that school started up again. But one figure that will prove alarming to the content creation industry is that the numbers are higher now than they used to be. "The baseline has been elevated," notes Garland. "Not only did the spike happen, but the bar was raised."