To provide free antivirus security means making the product available for people to download. Obviously, the number of downloads is then a good indication of how popular the product is (well, it needs to be taken with grain of salt… there is more to it than just one number … but it’s a good indication, nonetheless ;-))
First, we got a note from CNet a week or so ago that avast! was the 2nd most-downloaded antivirus on download.com in 2010 (behind AVG). Moreover, avast! has the highest editors’ and users’ ranking, which naturally put smiles on our faces. Download.com is the single biggest downloading site in the world, so to be second there is a great achievement. (BTW, all the best to AVG for the top spot and we hope we will switch places with them this year ;-))
Yesterday, a story from PC World popped-up via the alert notification… advising users “…looking for high-quality free software...“ to check out the “...best-reviewed and most-popular program...”. Yes, avast! Free Antivirus is their TOP choice and download for 2010. Thank you, PC World!
Btw, both articles are here:
http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-20024438-12.html
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/collection/collid,1660-order,4/files.html
That got me thinking: how did we do overall in 2010? Download.com is the biggest and PC World is certainly influential, but there are more downloading sites out there. Aside from Download.com, we monitor and have the stats for: Softpedia.com, Brothersoft.com, Softonic.com, 01net.com in France, Html.it in Italy, Chip.de in Germany, Dobreprogramy.pl in Poland, Softportal.com in Russia, Superdownloads.com.br and Baixaki.com.br in Brazil, and several others in smaller countries.
In total, we did really well in 2010! Combining all downloads from the sites we measure, avast! is the MOST downloaded free antivirus with a total of 141,320,488 downloads. AVG came second with 132 million, followed by 105 million downloads of Avira.
Not a bad year ;-)
