Just as the internet was finally planting
its roots within computers all across the world in the early 2000s, people began to
take advantage of it in ways which before weren’t possible. The World Wide Web was continuing to evolve,
and so were the people using it. File sizes got bigger, but for many, internet
speeds and bandwidth remained the same, which meant that downloading was going to become
more difficult: What do we do? The answer to that question was found in a
program which dominated computers of hardcore internet users throughout the duration of
the decade: uTorrent. This software took advantage of a revolutionary
technology that was introduced only a couple of years prior. The technology in question is in the name:
“torrenting,” and uTorrent was about to become the program that would popularize its
use for the masses. Websites could now provide downloads the size
of video game files at virtually no cost on the host’s end. The internet was about to change forever. It wouldn’t take long for uTorrent to become
the face of online file-sharing, the go-to for all your downloading needs. Want to finally get that one file you’ve
been trying to find, for years? uTorrent was the solution…Until things took
a turn. uTorrent was one of those programs that took
a devastating fall in popularity, but not in the way that you might think. I mean, the numbers boldly state otherwise,
but the people don’t. uTorrent went from being a pop-culture icon
of the internet to something that nobody talked about overnight, due to a series of both long-term
and short-term decisions which, for a long time, remained unrectified. What happened? What is the tragic story behind uTorrent? A program still quite popular, but arguably
now in the shadow of its former self. Now, there was a time during the internet’s
history where the first thing that people would check during the day were their uTorrent
downloads. Well for me, I like to check Morning Brew,
the sponsor of this video. I was one of those people that would mindlessly
browse social media way longer than I should, but what if you could turn that pastime into
something educational? Morning Brew is here to help you with that. It is a free daily newsletter and it gets
you up to speed on the latest and most breaking business news stories. Because I am often so occupied with other
things it can be hard to stay fully up to date on what’s going on in the world. Morning Brew only takes five minutes to tell
me just about everything I need to know. Whereas traditional news can often be boring
and lack personality, Morning Brew is witty and makes learning the news fun. Because of Morning Brew, I just learned that
there was a federal court case regarding cheese: is it still technically Gruyere cheese if
it doesn’t come from Switzerland? Perhaps that’s something you can debate
in the comments. There really isn’t a reason to not subscribe
to Morning Brew if you love learning about business, finance, or technology. By visiting the link down below, you can sign
up with Morning Brew right away. Not only is it free, it literally took me
less than 15 seconds to sign up. So, stay up to date and accurately informed
on today’s news, with Morning Brew. The old tale behind uTorrent’s prevalence
on the internet is a very curious one. As we mentioned, a series of very strange
events lead to the program becoming both popular and unpopular at the same time. The number of uTorrent downloads was affected,
but not enough to effect competition. Though the program itself is just not talked
about anymore, as if people don’t like associating themselves with it. Even the renowned package management system
Ninite stopped servicing uTorrent in around 2013. It has essentially become the Voldemort of
the internet: The Bittorrent Client Who Must Not Be Named, and it all boils down to three
things: poor marketing and business decisions, the lack of regard to adapting with constantly
growing technology, and on top of all this, the need of such a program simply becoming
less needed as time went on. As you could probably see, some of these factors
are a bit outside of uTorrent’s control, but when accompanied with the other problems
that were exclusive to uTorrent, they essentially act as the final nail in the coffin. It is important to note that the components
surrounding uTorrent’s lack of involvement with adapting to the times and its controversial
business changes, do go hand in hand, and it all has to do with how and why uTorrent
was even created in the first place. It goes all the way back to 2001: the era
of Napster and online file-sharing just prior to the release of the first iPod. Now, why is the iPod important? Well, this new wave of file-sharing was very
convenient but had a huge somewhat unprecedented problem attached to it: piracy! And it first started online hugely with music
files. Rather than going to the record store to buy
their vinyls or CDs to get music, they were instead…stealing it! Oh, the horror! And the internet was still the wild west at
this time, because it was so new. There wasn’t really any legislation put
in place for stopping it, so illegal music-sharing and Napster continued growing like a weed
every day. But when the iPod came into play and introduced
the ingenious iTunes store, Apple essentially found a compromise for music pirates. Getting an instant download to a song for
just $0.99 was perfectly reasonable, and then before you know it copyright law was updated
to take the internet into account, so good ole’ file-sharing Napster was now history. Of course, some form of online piracy goes
way back to the usenet days, but Napster was the piracy cultural explosion, practically
everyone was using it, which then lead to Limewire and then a bunch of other things. But why would piracy mostly start out with
music specifically, over other mediums of entertainment? Well, a big advantage that music had was its
small file size. A 2-minute song was probably only a couple
of megabytes. And on AOL dial-up technology, a file that
size would, worst case scenario, maybe take 10-minutes to download. Standard quality episodes of a TV show or
a whole movie on the other hand, could have been as big as 500MB, which could take up
the whole day to download. What if your sibling wanted to use the phone
during that time? The download would get interrupted, and you’d
likely have to start all over. You’d be out of luck, as that was really
all you could reasonably download with only dial-up internet speeds at your disposal. The technology just wasn’t there yet. Until July 2, 2001. Bram Cohen, a student at the University of
Buffalo created a program based on a technology that he invented just three months prior:
BitTorrent. The technology that it used had the same name. The BitTorrent protocol established a whole
new technique of downloading files that was both secure and made download speeds not much
of an issue. Okay, what does this have to do with uTorrent? We will get there, don’t worry. BitTorrent is derivative of an already existing
technology called P2P or “peer-to-peer.” That’s what Napster was. With P2P, you basically connected to the host’s
network, which would then find one other person also on that network that has the file you
are looking for. It would connect you to that person, share
their file with you, and then download it to your computer. But what if the person on the other end just
didn’t have a very good internet plan, and their upload speeds were slow? What if the government came in and shut down
the network altogether (just like they did with Napster)? You wouldn’t have access to that download
anymore, so what do you do? That’s when the BitTorrent protocol comes
in. To put it in analogous terms, let’s say
you come across this Andy Warhol style Twiggy painting series and now you just want it hanging
up in your living room. You happen to have a friend who has the exact
same art series, and you ask them to make a photocopy of it for you. So your friend takes one photo off the wall,
walks to the photocopier, makes a copy, puts it back in his living room, and then does
that whole process again with the three other photos. That’s the P2P way of doing things. Now, let’s say your friend knows four other
people who just so happen to have the same art series as well, and three of them agree
to also photocopy one of their paintings. These are called seeders. The fifth guy doesn’t want to partake in
that and just wants to keep the artwork on his wall for now. He’s called a leecher. So instead of your friend taking 30 minutes
to photocopy all the images himself, him and the three other people can divide up the task
and photocopy one photo at the exact same time and get it done in 5 minutes, the copies
are sent to you and the artwork is yours. Ta-da! That’s torrenting. Now in my example, the artwork goes from being
a painted canvas to a paper photocopy, but with actual torrenting, it is an exact duplicate. Torrenting makes a copy of little bits and
pieces of a file from multiple users and puts them all together to make the new copy of
that file for the downloading user. You’ve probably noticed that the more seeders
there are, the faster the download is. This is why. Does one of the seeders have a really slow
upload speed? Not a problem. Just prioritize one of the faster ones. Since P2P only has one user it relies on,
it can’t do that. The more people there are, the more likely
there will be people with fast upload speeds, which would help increase the speed of your
download. So if you wanted to download a 1GB file back
in 2001, you could probably do it overnight while you were sleeping, and if someone ever
needed to use the phone, it was much easier to just pause and resume a torrent download
because of all the seeders. Interruptions weren’t a problem. Lastly, torrenting had the advantage of creating
direct networks with each seeder, whereas P2P relied on the network provided by the
host or website. Taking down the network of a P2P sharing system
is easy, but if you take down a network for a torrent, it can always just find another
seeder. The network is so widely distributed, that
a file you download from thepiratebay could connect you with a user that downloaded it
from demonoid, as long as the files are exactly the same, since these websites don’t actually
host the files. This is exactly why .torrent files are so
small, even if the actual file is gigabytes big. They are simply just lines of code saying
“okay this where you go to get the actual file, now start downloading.” Websites hosting these torrent files didn’t
really have to worry about bandwidth anymore. With the introduction of the program BitTorrent
came a whole new way of downloading and a whole new community of torrenters. Now alternative bittorrent clients were starting
to come up, and that’s when uTorrent finally comes in. Now that might have seemed like a bit of a
tangent, but the historical context is crucial to understanding how uTorrent came about. As torrenting got more popular, it also became
more commercial, corporate. A lot of BitTorrent clients at the time were
essentially bloatware and some of them even started hosting ads. The programs themselves took up unnecessary
amounts of disk space and large amounts of power with sub-par performance, only for some
to even install adware to your computer. Well, in 2004, Swedish programmer Ludvig Strigeus
was determined to make the ultimate BitTorrent client. It would be lightweight, non-resource-intensive,
and more efficient! After about a year of on and off coding, uTorrent
was born...or technically “MicroTorrent” or myu-torrent, which is the name of the letter
in the Greek alphabet, but because this letter at the beginning of the word resembles a “U”
people just started calling it that. The true pronunciation of the word is debated,
but since the actual creator of the program himself calls it uTorrent, I’m just going
to stick with that for the rest of this video. And very soon after, the program would be
gladly embraced by the community for its simplicity. But then in December of 2006, the company
BitTorrent, Inc. which created the BitTorrent program and the protocol itself, sees the
potential of uTorrent and then buys it; they are now the new owners. Over the years, uTorrent’s market share
in the BitTorrent client community just continued to grow bigger, even surpassing the OG programs. By 2009, uTorrent skyrocketed, and then Limewire’s
dissolution in 2010 only helped them grow even further. It was only a matter of time that uTorrent
had practically become a social monopoly. It was the go-to for all your BitTorrent client
needs. uTorrent was the Google, and all the other
programs were the Bing and Ask.com. Having such a valuable resource at their hands,
BitTorrent Inc. wanted to figure out a way to make this grow even faster and make even
more money than they already were. The only way to do that was to change the
program up a bit, make it more commercially viable. uTorrent was free, BitTorrent Inc. made all
their money hosting ads on their website, which naturally got a lot of traffic from
people going there to download the program, but what if the company found a way to actually
make money from the program itself, while also keeping it free? Well, uTorrent made a decision with one update,
particularly version 3, that would prove to be extremely controversial. BitTorrent Inc. saw that they were making
a lot of money with the ads on their website. So, they decided to now put ads in the actual
program itself. Naturally, this upset a lot of people, but
the real reasons for why are a lot more nuanced than they probably appear at face value, and
it really all has to do with how torrenting works. Keep in mind that torrenting itself is not
illegal. It can actually be a very convenient alternative
to downloading very, very big files. Torrenting copyrighted content is illegal,
but that’s what torrenting is mostly used for, and the reason for this makes total sense. Let’s briefly go back to the painting example. Let’s say that the creator of these paintings,
me, found out that your friend was making photocopies of my work without my permission. I run down to his house and I demand him to
stop making these copies. And because I am so scary and intimidating,
he backs off he stops doing it. Thing is, I don’t know that the 3 other
people that own copies even exist. So yes while I did successfully shut down
a network, all I did was just bring the seed count down from 4 to 3. The photocopies will take longer, but you
will still get them eventually. This is why so many people use torrenting
for piracy. It is very hard to regulate and shut down
because of how distributed these networks. If the Pirate Bay were to suddenly shut down
tomorrow, that doesn’t really change anything. It might become more challenging to find,
but as long as you can get that same .torrent file from another server (that’s what magnet
links typically do), you’ll still be able to download the file. These circumstances have created a stigma
for torrenting as a practice, and that stigma has led to regular companies not wanting to
associate with or sponsor these products. Only malicious products want to sponsor other
malicious (or COULD be malicious) products, so you get malware sponsoring them instead. And so the reason is clear why something like
this would happen to a program like uTorrent. These companies have to make money somehow
especially if the programs are free. This actually sort of ties in to how ads on
YouTube work. People like to complain about YouTube creators
putting ads on their videos, and I get it, no one likes to sit through commercials when
they’re watching TV either. But it’s important to keep in mind that,
depending on the quality of the video, a single YouTube video alone can sometimes even cost
several hundred dollars to make. You have equipment, software, media licensing
fees, just to name a few. The creator is running a business at the end
of the day and they have to make up for that loss from their production budget, so how
do they do it? Well, through ads, sponsorships, merchandise,
a whole array of things. When you are providing content for free you
kind of have to sell your soul a little bit, and uTorrent is no exception to that, but
it just depends on who you sell your soul too. And that was uTorrent’s first problem. People weren’t as upset about it just having
ads, BitTorrent clients already had ads on them. It’s that uTorrent ads were basically malware
and adware. Not to mention some of them were…ooh la
la ads, not taking into account that children might be using these programs. It eventually got to the point where uTorrent
would surreptitiously download programs to the user’s computer without their full consent. Being a torrenting program, uTorrent had an
unfair reputation of only being used for pirating, so a lot of the bigger more main stream companies
that were uninformed about how torrenting worked, saw programs like uTorrent as just
a can of worms that shouldn’t be opened. The malware companies however, had no problem
sponsoring them. Ever notice how when you go on one of those
watch free movies websites, you are just bombarded with pop-up ads and tons of malicious programs? That’s because these programs know that
this is their target audience, because these websites aren’t exactly legal, and are not
part of a professional environment, sort of anything goes. So malware providers can work more efficiently
in that kind of environment. And although uTorrent was a perfectly legal
program, that stigma surrounding torrenting in general caught the attention of these malware
companies. uTorrent’s mistake was choosing to cave
in to these malicious sponsors. Programs liked Vuze hosted ads that were pretty
normal, uTorrent’s on the other hand, were just weird. They could have easily followed the approach
that Vuze took with the kind of ads they were displaying, but they just…didn’t. And long time users of uTorrent felt kind
of insulted by this, especially with why the program started in the first place. uTorrent started out specifically being a
lightweight BitTorrent client, that was the appeal for the people, and consequently, other
programs began to take note of that, and internet technology started to evolve with making these
kinds of programs lightweight. uTorrent took a very interesting, ironic turn,
and began to become more bloated as time went on, due to all the unwanted programs and ads
attached to it. It basically began reversing its progress
in the midst of an internet revolution that it arguably started. These changes were introduced in version three,
so a lot of people were either reverting back to version 2.2.1 (often considered the last
“good” version of uTorrent), or just started switching to another client altogether, since
that version was slowly becoming outdated. Over the years, users slowly started to question
uTorrent’s credibility, but the last straw, the incident that would make everything start
to crumble and even make the headlines of multiple news sites, would occur in 2015. People started to notice that uTorrent was
using a lot more CPU power than usual, and it would soon be revealed that this was because
uTorrent secretly installed a cryptocurrency software and was mining bitcoin, using people’s
computers. Users were livid, saying that what they did
was just unforgivable, they would never use uTorrent ever again. These bad changes created a program that was
just no longer adapting to the internet’s move towards lightweight efficiency. BitTorrent, Inc. saw the kind of backlash
that this was all getting, and quickly backpedaled on their decisions. The mining program was removed and so were
the inappropriate ads, but for many, the damage was done. This did lead to a huge fall in uTorrent's
reputation, but it wasn't the end...actually, not even close. Despite all this calamity and practically
every article discussing uTorrent bringing up these problems, uTorrent’s market share
is still going up. Why is that? It’s a couple of things. Firstly, a lot of newcomers within the torrenting
community are likely unaware of this past malfeasance that the program had on its hands. When they google for a BitTorrent client,
uTorrent is the first result, and since it’s the top one that advertises being lightweight,
that’s the first one they’re gonna download, without questioning it. It’s at the top of the results for a reason,
there can’t be anything wrong with it. Secondly, a lot of it is “popularity inertia.” uTorrent started off as the most popular program,
and will stay as the most popular program. That’s why it’s still one of the top results
when you search for it. People are just used to it. uTorrent is much safer now than it was, but
a lot of people will just never forget what happened, and now that the alternatives they
have switched to do the same thing but don’t have ads, AND are open source, they just see
no reason to go back. The current uTorrent is mostly people who
are new or just weren’t that affected by what happened, but had these things never
happened, uTorrent’s market share could arguably be even bigger, than it already is. For many, uTorrent became the very program
that it swore to destroy back in 2005, and to them, that was just unforgivable. The last thing to really bring down uTorrent’s
appeal to online users is something that actually affected everyone. Online piracy is at a decline. In 2006, BitTorrent file-sharing accounted
for 70% of all internet traffic, by 2011, that number dropped to 19%, and this is because
of the rise of streaming services. These companies parallel what iTunes did in
2001, they made a commercial compromise with online pirates. People could live with spending $0.99 on a
song, and now you can get access to pretty much every movie and TV show you’ve ever
watched, for what, $10 a month? Same goes for music programs like Spotify,
or gaming services like steam, or making once super expensive programs now subscription
based. The commercial alternatives were now more
convenient, and so torrenting just wasn’t as necessary anymore. And that was another reason not to use uTorrent. But with streaming services now becoming a
bit oversaturated and more expensive every day, perhaps we might see people rebel this
and therefore see pirating make a comeback. Only time will tell. Let me make it cleat that this video is not
a hit piece on uTorrent or BitTorrent, Inc. as a company by any means. It is simply a discussion on how one bad marketing
decision can cause significant collateral damage in the long-term, which can make it
quite difficult to make reparations, so you should always be careful. The fall of uTorrent is an example of how
not evolving with changing technology or people’s change in behavior online can lead to the
social irrelevancy of what was once considered a great product. uTorrent may have gotten the money and the
results that it wanted, but at the price of a long, dearly devoted community. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe,
and hit the notification bell, so that you never miss a future video.
