uTorrent Ad-free comes with a $4.95 per year tag
The makers of the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent revealed uTorrent Ad-Free yesterday, an advertisement free version for $4.95 per year.
The program has been available in two different versions up until now: a free, advertisement driven version, and a Pro version which adds add-on features to the client that are not linked directly to the downloading or seeding of torrent files, but to processing these files on the local system.
The company has been in hot water ever since it offered a Bitcoin miner via its advertising program which used resources of the PC to mine for Bitcoin in the background, often without the user noticing that this was happening.
BitTorrent Inc promised then that it would move away from the bundled software monetization model, and that it started to explore other monetization options.
uTorrent Ad-free
The new uTorrent Ad-Free plan is the result of that. There is still a free version of uTorrent available for users who don't want to pay, but it appears to ship with OpenCandy, a platform that monetizes software installations.
Windows users may get third-party offers that are unrelated to uTorrent when they install the program on their system.
The new uTorrent Ad-free version is offered for a subscription fee of $4.95 per year. It is a limited version of uTorrent Pro, as it shares the ad-free nature of the Pro version but does not come with the additional processing options of the Pro version.
For our latest development, we’re happy to introduce Ad-Free μTorrent 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% of the cost that it used to be – about 5 dollars a year instead of 20 dollars.
Free users of the program can subscribe to the new Ad-free version of uTorrent in two ways:
- Select Options > Get uTorrent Pro in the client. This opens upgrade options in uTorrent allowing you to pick Ad-free or Pro there directly.
- Open this page on the official uTorrent website instead. There you can get uTorrent Ad-free and uTorrent Pro directly without installing the free client first.
Remove ads
It is interesting to note that free users can remove the ads in the client without upgrading to the two new paid versions of uTorrent.
We described how this is done back in 2012, and the method works equally fine as of today.
- Select Options > Preferences while uTorrent is open.
- Click on Advanced.
- Search for "offers" using the Filter function.
- Locate offers.left_rail_offer_enabled, and set it to false (double-click on it).
- Locate offers_sponsored_torrent_offer_enabled, and set it to false.
Closing Words
Subscriptions seem to be the way to go in the software world these days. While they provide companies with a constant revenue stream, it is likely that the prospect of making annual payments to a company for use of a service or software does not appeal to all Internet users.
Those who want to support the makers of uTorrent, or any other program they use regularly, may prefer to make a one-time payment instead which is not supported right now.
They could in theory upgrade to uTorrent Ad-free for a year, and cancel their subscription afterwards.
Another thing to remember is that there are several BitTorrent clients out there that are equally good or maybe even better that don't cost any money.
Now You: Would you pay for an ad-free version to support the developers?
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.