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March 3, 2008

Much Hyped AllPeers To DeadPool

Michael Arrington

38 comments »

UK/Prague based peer to peer file sharing startup AllPeers announced that it is shutting down today: “We have not achieved the kind of growth in our user base that our investors were expecting, and as a result we are not able to continue operating the service.”

AllPeers first launched in 2006 to an incredible amount of user enthusiasm. They allowed anyone to create a private BitTorrent-like file sharing network via a Firefox extension.

We compared AllPeers to a number of competitors in late 2006 and found it to be the best service for those looking to create long term sharing networks with friends. Late last year they turned open source and began to build in full BitTorrent functionality into the service as well.

But apparently none of it was enough to keep the company on its feet. AllPeers had raised a single round of financing from Mangrove Capital Partners and Index Ventures.

AllPeers joins the DeadPool.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 7:20 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. college forum

    March 3rd, 2008 at 7:34 am

    Guess i’ll just have to set sail to the pirate bay

  2. Hustle Strategy

    March 3rd, 2008 at 7:41 am

    Seems like a decent concept. Will have to look into why they were not able to add users (or what they were doing to add users that did not work)…

  3. CouchTycoon

    March 3rd, 2008 at 7:53 am

    Does anybody know how many users they have (had)?

  4. Matthew Gertner

    March 3rd, 2008 at 7:59 am

    About 50,000 unique users logged into the service in the past 30 days.

  5. paul

    March 3rd, 2008 at 8:09 am

    anybody know what they’re going to do with the (critical) server-side code that they didn’t open-source?

  6. CouchTycoon

    March 3rd, 2008 at 8:19 am

    @Metthew Thanks!

    as an enthusiastic user i´d like to raise some money to keep allpeers alive. probably Index and Mangrove would sell their stakes?

    if you are interested too, vote here:
    http://couchtycoon.net/voting-.....-4-dollars

  7. Matthew Gertner

    March 3rd, 2008 at 8:20 am

    Paul - we’re still deciding. There’s a good chance we’ll open source that as well but I can’t promise anything yet.

  8. Baher

    March 3rd, 2008 at 8:41 am

    Considering the popularity of both file-sharing (BitTorrent et al) and Firefox browser, this news comes to me as a surprise, as the idea has all the merit in the world to work, and the fact that they weren’t able to get an additional round of funding says something about what’s happening in the company.

    They had a lead on a great idea, good product and a huge potential to create a business around it, and somehow they flopped!!!
    I’m guessing that the main part of the story is not being disclosed to the public.

  9. Jollyjo

    March 3rd, 2008 at 8:44 am

    Launched in 2006…that means they have been barely operating for two years…a short time by traditional standards. I am not sure that it’s the business model itself that was faulty or the company’s “pump and dump” strategy.

    While there is no evidence of trying to dump…it may very well be that the short term pumping did not create the interest they expected, hence our discussion today…

  10. Matt

    March 3rd, 2008 at 8:55 am

    let it be a lesson… services that primarily target the “piracy-generation” are doomed to fail. These kids never buy. For fucks sake, they are installing your app to circumvent purchases in the first place, how can you monotize someone like that? You can’t. Even if you introduced ad-support somehow… your target audience is not interested in those ads and their CPC value will quickly deteriorate…

    torrent/file sharing is NOT a viable “business” model. It cannot self-sustain… Needs big money behind it, LastFM is keeping its airway juuuust above water and they are legit & not limited to one browser…

  11. JD

    March 3rd, 2008 at 9:17 am

    Terrible news. I use AllPeers every day with my buddies. We’re not AIM fans. It was simple and useful.

  12. Peter Antypas

    March 3rd, 2008 at 9:26 am

    @10 Nailed it :)

  13. Peter

    March 3rd, 2008 at 9:31 am

    Wow. AllPeers is officially the first member of the deadpool that I will actually miss. I can’t speak to the viability of the business model, but AllPeers had a much better product than a lot of start-ups. I thought they had some nice features and I liked that they were open source. I hope the rest of the code gets opened up so it can still be developed.

  14. Frank Gruber

    March 3rd, 2008 at 9:33 am

    Dang. I really liked the tee shirt I got from them at TechCrunch40. R.I.P. AllPeers. :-(

  15. steve

    March 3rd, 2008 at 9:43 am

    Agreed, AllPeers was very cool, although I found that the occassional file transfer via IM or email was more convenient for most friends and I now use the specialized Simplify Media for music.

  16. Peter Antypas

    March 3rd, 2008 at 9:53 am

    @13: An investor that throws money into this hopes for a YouTube-like, “hockey stick” effect. They didn’t get that. Lesson learned? File-sharing is not mainstream enough to produce legitimate monetization opportunities. End of story.

  17. Mike

    March 3rd, 2008 at 9:55 am

    I use AllPeers often for sharing large video files for work. Will the project live on in open source, or is this the end of the road???

    …Mozilla should pick it up as a default Add-on for bitTorrent files in Firefox.

  18. Up next...

    March 3rd, 2008 at 9:57 am

    Pownce..

  19. cease

    March 3rd, 2008 at 10:22 am

    They need to do the write thing, and open it up. This was a great service, and plugin. Although I didn’t use it much, I have to say definitely worth the effort. I can see others definitely doing greater things with it.

  20. NotABug

    March 3rd, 2008 at 10:29 am

    And that’s what happens when you:

    - Base your business entirely on VCs to keep them running
    - Your competitors, even though they offer their products for free, make millions of dollars a year, no VCs needed.

    Stupid. I wonder how can people manage to convince VCs to get them money without having a sustainable business which is just based on “expected growth”.
    Morron VCs for putting money on them.

  21. Justin

    March 3rd, 2008 at 10:54 am

    WASTE did all this, except it didn’t do multi-source or swarming; it was only one-to-one. But it can function as an awesome vpn for sharing files only.

  22. Mike Doeff

    March 3rd, 2008 at 11:08 am

    This one is a head scratcher. AllPeers had so much momentum back in 2006. If the founder(s) are reading this, please consider writing up a “lessons learned” blog post detailing what went wrong so that other entrepreneurs can learn from this. Maybe this was one of those ideas that was a little ahead of it’s time?

  23. Yakov

    March 3rd, 2008 at 11:22 am

    They should have tried to sell their assets via eBay and the others

  24. Tian

    March 3rd, 2008 at 11:33 am

    I am really surprised they shut it down.

  25. Charlie

    March 3rd, 2008 at 11:50 am

    Much hyped… by you.

  26. Fabian Schonholz

    March 3rd, 2008 at 1:51 pm

    It is a bummer. I thought they had a good idea.

  27. AnonTroll

    March 3rd, 2008 at 3:48 pm

    All aboard the cock boat.
    Set sail for dick.

  28. jamboree

    March 3rd, 2008 at 4:11 pm

    From the allpeers blog:
    http://www.allpeers.com/blog/

    “The past few years have been an incredible adventure for us. We would like to thank all of the amazing people who have helped us along the way….the many volunteers who spent hours translating each AllPeers version into fifteen different languages to make it available to non-English speakers across the world”

    The founders get to call this an “incredible adventure”… a “learning experience”… what do the volunteers who sacrificed their free time helping to build the product get?

  29. Mike Cane

    March 3rd, 2008 at 4:43 pm

    This is terrible news. I used it every day!

    http://mikecane2008.wordpress......ting-down/

  30. Avatar

    March 3rd, 2008 at 5:32 pm

    i predicted this a year ago. since they were very stubborn and didn´t did what the the other big plugins in firefox did after getting all the relevancy that they could in firefox but not the growth.

    what is that?

    a IE version.

    you think i am wrong?..

    just look at what happened to Foxytunes, StumbleUpon and PicLens just to mention the more relevant. two got acquired and one is on the verge of being acquired any day now. this didn´t happen until they had a IE version of their service. coincidence?. i think not.

    Simple business sense.

  31. Pierre Col - UbicMedia

    March 4th, 2008 at 2:35 am

    Despite the sad AllPeers failure, I’m still convinced that P2P network technologies are the most efficient way to distribute multimedia contents across the Internet, and especially huge HD movies !

    For me it appears as an evidence: the diffusion of “HD” (720 for “HD ready” or 1080 for “full HD” pixel height by 1280 or 1920 pixel width screen resolution in 16/9 format, with 24 fps and a bitrate ranging from 8 to 30 Mb/s) on the Internet will not be done using basic streaming or regular downloading (even with the help of CDNs like Akamai, Limewire etc) for cost issues.

    The diffusion of HD movies and videos, and the online availability of huge catalogues of movies today available in SD but not yet released, will force the content providers to us peer-to-peer technologies, or other smartly distributed systems allowing to globally optimize the use of IP bandwidth available worldwide. That is exactly the reason why BitTorrent or Mininova have launched their “low cost P2P CDN” offers.

  32. HHL-Absolvent

    March 4th, 2008 at 2:41 am

    Their marketing was bad, nobody outside the tech-crowd knowed their service.

  33. Bruce Miller

    March 4th, 2008 at 6:33 pm

    Wow! RIP AllPeers. Luckily I have found an alternative called 2Peer. If anyone else used AllPeers I found 2Peer somewhat similar. You can download at: http://www.2peer.com/

  34. Baxter Tocher

    March 15th, 2008 at 10:39 am

    A real shame. This was a nice project, and a lot of folks were very enthusiastic about it.

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