eDonkey reaches 4 Million Users

May 15, 2005

With little fanfare, Edonkey has reached a milestone. It has surpassed it's 4 millionth user. This is by no means a record in itself for users online but it's been a few years since this many users has been identified. The Fasttrack network has that record for most users ever. While Fastrack is still around, it is nowhere near what it was while Edonkey continues to grow and thrive.

While it seems the RIAA has made great efforts to stop the file sharing community from continuing its efforts, it has had little or no affect on people spreading the file sharing word. Whenever a new new round of lawsuits comes around it always seems that more and more users are willing to take the chance and logon for the first time. I guess the old saying is true, any publicity is good publicity.

It has been a long time since a P2P network has reached an identifiable 4 million users. While BitTorrent may come close, its highly distributed nature does not allow for an efficient network crawl. The last network to obtain such heights was FastTrack, when back in 2003 this community reached 4.5 million users. Since that time, the RIAA's lawsuits have devastated FastTrack leaving it with approximately 2.7 million users.

Today, the eDonkey2000 network bypassed 4 million users at approximately 12:00 PM EST. ocbMaurice's eDonkey2000 network crawler hit 4,018,712 estimated users, before settling back to 3,961,050 an hour later. The network statistics provided by eMule concurred with this estimate.

Of course, network crawlers are far from an exact science; however they do provide an excellent indication of a community's trend over time. As eDoney2000 continues its climb, perhaps it will be the first network to reach 5 million concurrent users.

Go and see what all the new found usage is all about at Slyck.com

Source: Slyck