I never would have guessed this one: According to Ellacoya, a company that creates broadband networks for clients, HTTP internet traffic (with 46%) is barely beating out P2P networks (41%) as the largest source of bandwidth usage. And only two years ago, P2P file sharing accounted for 65% of the internet’s bandwidth - I had no idea porn and illegally downloaded anime were that popular.

But the real kicker for me - YouTube alone is the source of nearly 10% of all data transferred over the internet, or 20% of all HTTP data. One website that’s been around for only two years uses 10% of our bandwidth. Try to wrap your head around how big of a deal that is (YouTube: 1, Thailand: 0).

You can read the press release here, but it’s really not that interesting… Maybe I’ll just watch some funny music videos on YouTube instead.

via TorrentFreak

I had no idea porn and illegally downloaded anime were that popular.

Say what? How could you underestimate this segment? Along with music, video, and warez torrents (as well as legit ones, like open-source distros), it wasn’t surprising to me that P2P was such a huge percentage of total traffic a few years ago.

As for YouTube — it’s more interesting to consider streaming video in general, as opposed to YouTube itself. YouTube is certainly the pioneer in this area, but there aren’t any competitors right now, so they’re getting 100% of the streaming video audience, and that’s an audience that’s only bound to continue growing in the future. While there may be other YouTubes popping up shortly, I don’t expect to see the streaming video % decrease any time soon.