There are two juggernauts of the BitTorrent community, The Pirate Bay and MiniNova. While The Pirate Bay takes most of the headlines for the world's largest tracker, MiniNova has flown quietly under the radar and has become the world’s largest indexer. With a clean interface and a search engine that actually returns something relevant, MiniNova has accumulated a following that as of today downloaded their 4 billionth torrent file.

From MiniNova’s auspicious beginnings, Niek van deer Maas, Business Developer and founder of MiniNova, conceptualized his creation as a mere side project. However, during the early months of 2005, the file-sharing world was quickly transitioning from eDonkey2000 to BitTorrent. MiniNova caught the wave at the right moment, and before long, the Dutch based BitTorrent tracker was soon carving out an impressive niche.

“When we launched back in January 2005, we were the first BitTorrent site to offer a sophisticated search engine, sorting of search results, categorization, etc.,” Niek told Slyck.com. “We try to keep our lead by innovating and extending our website with new features. Many things changed in the past years, but one thing will always be the same: we try to offer the #1 P2P directory and search engine.”

The MiniNova concept caught on. By May of 2006, MiniNova's fledgling userbase downloaded400 million torrent files. Eight months later in January of 2007, Niek’s creation would hit 1 billion downloads – an achievement reached just days shy of their 2 year anniversary

The time between each billion accelerated in 2007, and by May, MiniNova accounted for its 2 billionth download. MiniNova’s growth was now stratospheric, and 3 billion wasn’t too far ahead.

“This is very good news, it means our site is growing exponential: the amount of total torrent downloads roughly doubles every half year,” Niek remarked on MiniNova’s 2 billionth torrent served. “And more downloads means more exposure, so more content available on our website.”

Only 4.5 months later in November of 2007, MiniNova reached the 3 billion torrent milestone. By now, MiniNova had confirmed its presence at one of the leading BitTorrent trackers. To accommodate its increasing popularity, server power was added. Server power is great for downloaders, however, what about giving back to the artists? Taking advantage of MiniNova’s position as one of the top ranked websites, Niek launched MiniNova CD (Content Distribution), an avenue for any aspiring artist to seed their work. The goal of the initiative was to allow any computer user, even with marginal skill, to expose their work to the world with just one mouse click.

Date: 2008-02-17 Source: http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1664