CacheLogic has released a new report presentation on peer-to-peer traffic trends, based on measurement of networks worldwide. (The interesting part starts at slide 5.)
P2P traffic continued to grow in 2005. As expected, there was no dropoff after the Grokster decision.
Traffic continues to shift away from the FastTrack network (used by Kazaa and others), mostly toward eDonkey. BitTorrent is still quite popular but has lost some usage share. Gnutella showed unexpected growth in the U.S., though its share is still small.
CacheLogic speculates, plausibly, that these trends reflect a usage shift away from systems that faced heavier legal attacks. FastTrack saw several legal attacks, including the Grokster litigation, along with many lawsuits against individual users. BitTorrent itself didn’t come under legal attack, but some sites directories of (mostly) infringing BitTorrent traffic were shut down. eDonkey came in for fewer legal attacks, and the lawyers mostly ignored Gnutella as insignificant; these systems grew in popularity. So far in 2005, legal attacks have shifted users from one system to another, but they haven’t reduced overall P2P activity.
Another factor in the data, which CacheLogic doesn’t say as much about, is a possible shift toward distribution of larger files. The CacheLogic traffic data count the total number of bytes transferred, so large files are weighted much more heavily than small files. This factor will tend to inflate the apparent importance of BitTorrent and eDonkey, which transfer large files efficiently, at the expense of FastTrack and Gnutella, which don’t cope as well with large files. Video files, which tend to be large, are more common on BitTorrent and eDonkey. Overall, video accounted for about 61% of P2P traffic, and audio for 11%. Given the size disparity between video and audio, it seems likely that the majority of content (measured by number of files, or by dollar value, or by minutes of video/audio content) was still audio.
The report closes by predicting the continued growth of P2P, which seems like a pretty safe bet. It notes that copyright owners are now jumping on the P2P bandwagon, having learned the lesson of BitTorrent, which is that P2P is a very efficient way to distribute files, especially large files. As for users,
End users love P2P as it gives them access to the media they want, when they want it and at high speed …
Will the copyright owners’ authorized P2P systems give users the access and flexibility they have come to expect? If not, users will stick with other P2P systems that do.
