BitTorrent Offers $5 Ad-Free Subscription for uTorrent

Tired of seeing ads in your favorite BitTorrent client? If you're using uTorrent, you can now kill advertising in your client for a small annual fee. You could, of course, use another BitTorrent client entirely, but perhaps you've grown fond of uTorrent.

"As reported in this forum previously, we've been busy experimenting with new ways to improve uTorrent for our users while financially supporting the amazing team that works every day to make uTorrent free for millions of people around the world," BitTorrent said ina blog post(Opens in a new window).

"For our latest development, we're happy to introduce Ad-Free uTorrent for $4.95 USD annual subscription. This gives users the option of avoiding any and all ads in the client. It's exciting to us because it gives users the ability to avoid advertising at 25 percent of the cost that it used to be – about 5 dollars a year instead of 20 dollars."

Admittedly, uTorrent's move isn't all that revolutionary since BitTorrent has offered an ad-free subscription package for uTorrent sinceNovember 2014(Opens in a new window). However, the not-so-low cost of $20 per year for the Pro service was probably a bit steep for people who just want to ditch ads and don't care about the mode's other features, like premium customer support, malware protection, and torrent streaming.

Presumably, a small annual payment of $5 is much easier to deal with, and we'll be curious to see how many users sign up. Already, the fairly popular app has more than 100 million downloads across all the platforms where it's available. Though, whenannouncing the milestone(Opens in a new window), BitTorrent neglected to indicate just how many people are actually paying the company money for said app versus those who are just using it for free.

Finding a way to monetize uTorrent without annoying users has been one of BitTorrent's goals for quite a long time.

"As you know, uTorrent is a free piece of software. To support it, we use bundled software and offers to offset the cost that would otherwise be paid directly by the user. This is a familiar revenue model that is commonly used by software companies. It allows us to fund the costs associated with software development, as well as other projects and innovations," readsa forum post(Opens in a new window)from the uTorrent team in August of 2015.

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"Now for the full disclosure: We've never been satisfied with this revenue model. It requires compromises that detract from a premium user experience. We want to find a model that adds value to our product and our users. We want to find a better way."

We're curious if BitTorrent might even consider a lifetime subscription for the app, though it's unlikely that those who are using the app to download less-than-legal copies of things would be very interested in paying a lot of money for it.