Slashdot Mirror
New Tool Tracks Online Media Consumption
Carl Bialik writes "Technology and market research company BigChampagne is introducing a measurement tool called BCDash to let media companies quickly track how people -- legally or illegally -- use their products online. BigChampagne said BCDash will bring together data from AOL, Yahoo Music, iTunes, and Wal-Mart, along with estimates of illegal file sharing activity for specific titles. It's meant as a marketing tool, the WSJ reports: 'Media companies have often been caught flat-footed when a video or song takes off online. By the time they try to capitalize on it, the opportunity often has passed.'"
It will be interesting to see how realistic their estimates are, or if every man, woman, and child on the planet is thought to bw trying to download Ashlee Simpson's latest wailings.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
along with estimates of illegal file sharing activity for specific titles.
And how pray tell will you acheive this?
Root kits that phone home? IP logs from torrent sites? Or a magic 8ball? Or perhaps the good old fashioned dartboard?
Hrmm... Either they are commiting questionable practices or they are pulling magic numbers out of places where the sun don't shine.
I tend to think it will be the latter since it will be cheaper and no one who buys their service will be able to prove them wrong.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
So, how are they going to come up with those estimates of illegal file sharing. And how can I best skew their data? I wonder if I could get all slash-dotters to go along with a massive download of Milli Vanilli songs just to throw them off?
I, for one, welcome our web behavior-tracking overlords. Seriously -- as a consumer I have no problem with data being harvested about what I do. It just might cause an ad broker to pop a relavent one in front of me leading to buy something and boost my quality of life. Where's the downside? Machines looking over my shoulder and putting me into pie charts? As a web publisher, I'm glad to know the demographics my access log reveals as I for example pump up traffic from my top referrers as they'd be the most efficient for my time/dollar.
Tracking installed software? How could it possibly work without being spyware? P2P tracking works because the user is broadcasting its existence to the world. Most software doesn't do this, and even if it DID the pirates would strip that "feature" out.
On a side note, this looks like vaporware. A google search for BCDash turns up nothing relevant.
a company called BigChampagne just screams of 2 spotty nerds in their moms basement
Media companies have often been caught flat-footed when a video or song takes off online. By the time they try to capitalize on it, the opportunity often has passed.
Umm, think maybe its because there was NO USE FOR THEM?
When all is said and done, our economy, our government, ourselves, we all will have dedicated massive amounts of time and money subsidizing Sony's dead profit model. How come we can do that, but we can't throw amtrack a nickle or two?
Why stick up for big business?
My issue is that if you want to track my habits, track my purchases, my downloads, etc, then make the data available to me as well.
It'd be great to see a geographic breakdown of where my friend's band is most popular. It'd be fairly novel to see musical trends e.g. a resurgance of raggae downloads in Brooklyn.
If you're going to track my data, at least make the results available to me as well.
--
Jim
http://www.runfatboy.net/
What the companies fail to realize is that you can't use free or "illegal" file sharing/downloading as a marketing statistic to calculate your losses or even market potential.
There are people who download TONS of free and/or illegal movies, games, music, etc... but its not like all those people would be paying for them if they weren't available for free.
I think all that these stats do is give fuel for Microsoft, Metallica, and Disney to convince ignorant judges and lawyers to sue the pants off some 15 year old kid.
Am I alone in thinking so?
--
"Man Bites Dog
Then Bites Self"
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
BCCrash, the program that eliminates BCDash's tracking capabilities.
'Media companies have often been caught flat-footed when a video or song takes off online. By the time they try to capitalize on it, the opportunity often has passed.'
The reason the media has "taken off online" is because it is easily accessable and quickly 'obtained', not because it is locked into DRM or worse in CD format on a store shelf.
Pat
So this combination of cookies, product phone home, and data mining, is new technology how?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
for example, if a music video is watched more in one part of the country or a song is played more on a particular music service. That information might alert a band that they need to add tour dates in a particular area, or flag a promotion opportunity on a certain Web site....BigChampagne has clients such as movie studios, record labels and television companies.
This seems to be somewhat self-fullfilling with the power of advertising, and will help the huge corporate media to get bigger and more powerful. The indy labels, small bands, lesser-known artists will most likely not gain anything. This is great for media corps, but the 99.9% of everyone else they gain nothing, and keep hearing the same crap from the latest Pop Idol and the like.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I'm going to copyright my emule usage. Then the RIAA can expect a nice lawsuit when they try to use these stats.
Man, you really need that seminar!
BigChampagne is Watching You.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Anybody remember the MTV Total Request Live Devo prank? TRL allows you to phone in what you want played on the show. Most popular vote gets played. Fark and a few other websites tried to get Devo's "Whip It" to get played - sort of like an online version of a flashmob.
We could do something very very similar here with something as simple as a dinky little Perl script.
All it has to do is hit your favorite P2P network that's being monitored, and make a request every so often. If you space out the requests and get a lot of people doing it, the net won't flood but the harvested data will be skewed.
I wonder what the reprecussions would be if Big Media discovered the most downloaded movie of 2006 was Brazil and the most downloaded song was Jocko Homo?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Why should my web habits and downloads be given freely so corporations can make money from them. You what my info pay me for it.
Your data doesn't belong to you, didn't you read the EULA? But I'm sure you can have it for a price...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
the total universe they portend to be projecting to. So are they going to 'sample' data from the peer-to-peer networks as well as collect from the big boys and when they're done with their sample, what is the total project going to extrapolate to?
From their site: BigChampagne collects a great deal of information about media consumption both online and offline through our partners. We also employ our own patent-pending systems for observing peer-to-peer ("P2P") file sharing and searching.
This info is great for momentum tracking and marketers may find this valuable, but I'd caution on expectations that they can project to the total population.
This also has the chance to become DoubleClick 2.0.
csorice7
Working to make ideas into reality. www.i4e.com
What, blocked several ways at my computer and router?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Check the source at the bottom
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Did anyone else read this as a story about new songs from Tool?
Well then, nevermind...
Media companies have often been caught flat-footed when a video or song takes off online. Or quite the opposite. The flat-foots often try to catch the illegal filesharers.
Great, how do you block it?
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
I originally read this without the rest of the title and decided that someone had leaked the new TOOL album and Slashdot was posting about it. Guess it's kinda on the brain right now.
And did totally "pwning" the parent poster bring you lasting happiness? ;)
well said with that Amtrack comment. Why not reward whoever can plant the most oxygen producing flora in a single month with a million dollar jackpot? imagine how many people would be clammoring for their shot at the prize and how fresh the air would be next month :)
GNUTella networks send the data through many clients before it reaches its destination. By monitoring this traffic with a modified client, one can get a reasonably good sampling of what users are searching for and/or downloading. [...] But the very nature of these networks do make it possible to obtain useful stats.
Gnutella networks do not work like that. Queries and query hit messages go through the Gnutella mesh network, so it's possible to get some kind of sampling of what people are searching for as well as what responses they're getting to their searches. However,
1. You will not see all of the searches that go through the network.
2. You will only see a tiny, tiny fraction of the hits resulting from the searches that you do see.
But searches do not equal downloads. When was the last time you visited every search result that came up on google?
Actual downloads happen over direct connections between downloaders and uploaders. The Gnutella network has no facility for proxied downloads.
The only clue you will ever get that a transfer may be taking place is in the case that:
1. One of the hosts cannot receive incoming connections for whatever reason (firewall, NAT, etc.).
2. Your computer is between the uploader and the downloader on the Gnutella network.
3. You have already seen the query hit describing the file that somebody is trying to download.
If all of the above happen, you may see a PUSH packet when someone tries to download a file. However,
1. A PUSH packet represents an attempt to start downloading a file under the above conditions. It doesn't mean that the transfer actually completes.
2. Only a tiny, tiny fraction of all downloads will generate a PUSH packet that you can see.
3. In some cases, you may see more than one push packet for a single download, as a result of multisource downloading.