Mininova blog

Hi all!

Good news: Canada’s public broadcaster CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) joined Mininova’s recently launched Content Distribution service in order to distribute the new TV Show Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister.

The show, which premiered last Sunday, will be published annualy on Mininova one day after the TV airtime. The copies are of high quality (720×486 XViD) and come without any DRM restrictions. The choice for BitTorrent as distribution protocol is obvious: the distribution costs are practically zero.

Interested in the show? Check out CBC’s user page or subscribe to their RSS feed. Make sure to download an episode and leave your comments.

For more information, check the coverage of TorrentFreak on this story.

We’re very much looking forward to other broadcasters following CBC’s example. Stay tuned for updates!

We’ve got great and exciting news! Mininova passed the 4 billion (4.000.000.000) torrent downloads mark today

It’s nice to see that the download counter continues to speed up: after reaching 3 billion downloads back in November 2007, we expected to reach the current number only in March or April.

For the sake of clarity: our download counter represents the number of times a .torrent file is downloaded from Mininova, this is not identical to the number of times a peer completes the download.

Some additional statistics for those who’re interested: our Alexa rank is currently 54, and Google Analytics shows that more than 32 million unique visitors used Mininova last month. These people together generate more than 510 million pageviews per month, which causes quite some pressure on our servers. We do whatever we can to minimize downtime and add extra servers when necessary.

Thanks to everyone who helped us to accomplish this! Special thanks go to our moderating team, who did and do a marvelous job.

As always: stay tuned, more big news is coming up very soon.

Press coverage: Slyck, ZeroPaid, AfterDawn, TechRadar, TechDigest, ITavisen (Norwegian), TorrentFreak, DSLreports

Hi there!

It’s January 14, and that means the anniversary of Mininova! Today we celebrate that Mininova is 3 years old.

It’s been a very interesting time, especially the past year. Mininova showed a tremendous growth, we’re happy to see that we’re nowadays the most visited torrent site.

In April last year we won the domain dispute regarding www.mininova.com. This domain was used by a scammer and showed a fake website, but fortunately the judge agreed with us and the .com domain is now ours.

We’re very glad that we reached the 2 billion downloads milestone in June, followed by the 3 billion downloads one in November. It shouldn’t be too long before we reach the 4 billion downloads.

And that’s not all: we also launched a new video website last summer, called Snotr. This site is doing pretty well, and has already gained quite some regular visitors.

And last but not least, a few weeks ago we launched our new Content Distribution (CD) service, a.k.a featured torrents. The CD service is doing very well, more than 200 publishers are now actively using Mininova to share their content for free. We’re very excited to expand this service in the near future, please stay tuned for announcements.

As described above, the past year was a very interesting one, but we’re sure the year ahead will be even more exciting.

Thanks a lot for all your continued visits (as users), the excellent support of our moderating team, the cooperation from our hosters and everyone else who made this possible!

See you around!

- Niek, on behalf of the Mininova staff

Hi there,

We’re very excited to announce the immediate availability of a new service on Mininova: Content Distribution (CD). In the past months, we developed a distribution service which we think will rock the world

The reason we developed this service is that we’re used getting quite some emails from (mainly indie) content producers. Many of those are interested in publishing their content on Mininova, but that’s not an easy job. Most content producers have no technical knowledge of P2P and BitTorrent at all. We’re changing this with the introduction of CD.

Using Mininova CD, producers can upload their content once to Mininova with literally a single click. We convert their uploads to dot-torrent files and seed the content from our seed servers. This content will be shown as “Featured torrents” on the front-page. The best part: the service is 100% free

To give you a better idea of the process, here are some screenshots showing the service:

Quite some content producers already applied for CD, among others Red Band, Wil Deynes and Cruxy. BitTorrent Inc. also joined the party, they will distribute free games (and later movies) on Mininova.

Content producers reading this are invited to apply for an account at http://www.mininova.org/distribution.

But CD is not the only thing we worked on the past months. We’re also introducing some new features and enhancements on the website:

• For uploaders, it’s now possible to edit their torrents up to 24 hours after the upload time.
• We added a “thanks” button to the comment page, along of a country flag. Please use this button instead of posting a “thank you” comment.

• Personalized front-page. Under My settings, there’s now the option to shuffle (and disable) the categories at the front-page.

• Also several layout changes in order to make the site more usable.

And last but not least: we gave our logo some nice Christmas attributes. Merry Christmas everyone and a happy new year!