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.'"

Comments

Re:Real or **AA WAGs?

[donnyspi]

I their estimates will be about as reliable as Windows vs. Linux TCO studies I read about in computer magazines.

O RLY?

[vertinox]

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 mean, c'mon.

[Douglas Simmons]

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.

Available to the masses

[RunFatBoy.net]

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/

bad statistic

[ExE122]

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"

Re:bad statistic

[Reziac]

I had a related thought... as soon as the content owners notice that FileX is the hot download of the day, they could announce that FileX is available FROM THEIR OWN SITES, for a nominal charge -- and they can guarantee that it's a good file and available immediately.

As word spreads, they'd become the FIRST place people look for media downloads, and would make a killing on micropayments. What's more, this could be automated, and after the initial setup, would be effectively free of all costs other than bandwidth. It'd be like free money falling on their heads, with all the marketing done BY the customer base.

Yeah, some of these legally-downloaded files will find their way to P2P networks, but so what? Who'd waste time scrounging P2P, and hoping to get an intact and correct download, when for 10 cents you could get the real thing, guaranteed to be a good file AND free of legal threats??

And the piracy issue could be largely eliminated by offering affiliate programs, frex:

1) you host the files and provide the bandwidth, and you get NN-percent of the payment for each file. And to thank you for hosting the files, you get free personal use of the content.

Or 2) for folks without adequate servers of their own, these affiliates could provide a web portal that links to the content owner's server, and get some smaller percentage of the payment.

If the content owners did all this, P2P piracy would largely dry up overnight -- it wouldn't be worth the effort for average folks, and getting in on the gravy train would attract a whole lot of the people who presently collect and distribute huge numbers of files just because they CAN, not because they have any real use for them.

Re:bad statistic

[Thing 1]

I completely agree with you.

The problem is, the content middle-men will never agree with you. They want a huge cut of a huge number, not a tiny cut of a tiny number -- or even a huge cut of a tiny number.

New?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

So this combination of cookies, product phone home, and data mining, is new technology how?

Re:Real or **AA WAGs?

[mallardtheduck]

BigChampagne: "We estimate 15-billion illegal copies of Britney Spears latest album have been downloaded."
RIAA: "Our losses this year due to piracy amount to 1500-trillion dollars, we need stronger laws!"
Congressman: "That'll be another 10 billion in campaign contributions, please."

Re:Media Consumption

[AKAImBatman]

I think you're missing the point. One of the most valuable statistics to the entertainment industry is what is popular in the "underground" at the moment. That popularity is often a good indicator of what can be successfully marketed to the general public. Or as a friend of mine used to say, "By the time a music track goes mainstream, it's popularity at the clubs I go to has already come and gone."

The purpose of this tool is to harness internet downloads to find out what might be highly marketable, and what isn't. And if they can get geographic data on its popularity, they'll even be able to target their marketing in the appropriate areas.