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This article was published on June 16, 2014

BitTorrent has delivered over 100 million ‘direct to fan’ Bundles since alpha launch 13 months ago


BitTorrent has delivered over 100 million ‘direct to fan’ Bundles since alpha launch 13 months ago

BitTorrent today announced it has delivered more than 100 million Bundles since the new media format’s launch just 13 months ago. The company also revealed that a typical BitTorrent Bundle now drives over 554,000 impressions, 167,000 downloads, and more than 16,000 streams in just 24 hours.

Back in May 2013, BitTorrent launched what it calls “an Alpha experiment in digital publishing”: a BitTorrent Bundle is a multimedia format, a new type of torrent file, which promotes fan interaction within the content as opposed to outside via third-party tools. The company argues that as a result, media becomes more valuable each time it’s shared.

Here’s how the company summarizes what it has achieved in the last 13 months:

Since May 2013, we’ve worked with some of the world’s most amazing artists. Moby. Madonna. Cut/Copy. De La Soul. Diplo. Death Grips. Werner Herzog. Hundred Waters. Lee Scratch Perry. Lucy Walker. Joshua Oppenheimer. Gabe Polsky. Public Enemy. Amanda Palmer. We’ve made mixtapes. We’ve mixed new EPs. We’ve mapped live shows. We’ve 3D printed film. We’ve gotten past censors. We’ve beaten some of our own odds. And along the way, our Alpha experiment has grown, and grown up.

To put that further into perspective, monthly Bundle site visitors have now eclipsed the 25 million mark. This is largely caused by a network effect: BitTorrent says 25 percent of visitors share the content across at least one social channel. Furthermore, 75 percent of site traffic from Bundles comes from returning users.

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Although it’s still technically an experiment, BitTorrent has already launched a Bundle for Publishers platform in September, added search and tagging to help fan discovery, and made it possible to embed Bundles on any website or blog. More than 10 percent of all Bundles are now streamed.

BitTorrent wouldn’t share what it has exactly planned next for Bundle, though it did continue to push the idea that decentralized technologies can bring artists and fans closer together. Either way, the company is well on its way to hitting 1 billion downloads in just a few years.

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