BitTorrent removes ability to turn off ads in µTorrent

The American firm BitTorrent has removed the option to stop showing ads in the latest version of its popular torrent client µTorrent. With the introduction of advertisements in the client, a lot of unrest arose and this option was introduced.

According to TorrentFreak, µTorrent is a primary source of income for BitTorrent. The millions of users of the torrent client, which is available for multiple operating systems, would be good for about five billion ‘impressions’ per month when showing advertisements. Perhaps for that reason, BitTorrent omitted the option to disable ad display in the latest stable build, version number 3.4.2.

The announcement of BitTorrent in August 2012 to start showing advertisements in the main µTorrent window caused a lot of unrest. Some users did not like this step and demanded the option to disable the banners. In the end, BitTorrent decided to accede to this request: in the advanced settings there was a registry setting to block the ads in the torrent client.

The µTorrent forum now once again criticizes BitTorrent’s move. Some users say this will hurt the torrent client’s popularity, while others say they will move to alternative clients. BitTorrent does not mention anything about removing the option in the 3.4.2 changelog.