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

Real or **AA WAGs?

[Shadow Wrought]

along with estimates of illegal file sharing activity for specific titles.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Re:O RLY?

[AKAImBatman]

And how pray tell will you acheive this?

1. 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.

2. Unless the torrent is private, anyone can connect to the server and all kinds of stats on the number of seeds and leechers.

I'm not up on how Kazaa or eDonkey work, so I won't comment on those. But the very nature of these networks do make it possible to obtain useful stats.

Re:O RLY?

[MattskEE]

As already mentioned by others, GNUTella networks are fairly easy to monitor, and bittorrent sites usually post statistics, and could easily be monitored with a modified client.

Also, IRC, where a lot of files start their meandering paths across the internet, can also be monitored. The technology behind IRC search sites like PacketNews could be used to monitor how many people in how many channels are sharing your file, and in some cases, when files are requested with triggers in the main channel, you can find out about how wide your file is spreading.

It may also be a good idea to read this article on file sharing, which covers the process many files follow to make their way from release groups to the general public. In the article you will see read about someone who is an insider in many file sharing rings who consults with media companies on how their files are spreadin

There are, naturally, file sharing vectors that they have no capacity to monitor, but they can get a very good picture with a bit of easily obtained data and a bit statistics. It's hard to say *exactly* how accurate it is, but it can certainly be used as a reliable relative indicator on which files are downloaded more than others.

Tracking "illegal" file sharing?

[skayell]

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?

Re:Tracking "illegal" file sharing?

[MarkGriz]

"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?"

What do you mean "get us to go along with..."?

Doesn't everyone like Milli Vanilli?

Why are looking at me like that?

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.

Re:I mean, c'mon.

[drooling-dog]

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.

I often try to increase my quality of life by buying stuff, but usually my purchases fail to do so in any meaningful sense, or for any significant length of time. A friend of mine claims that I will never find happiness this way, and should seek other ways to improve the quality of my life. He is a Buddhist, though, and I am an American. I am also a consumer, and what is my destiny if not to consume? Clearly if I am consuming and yet remain unfulfilled, my failure must be in the consuming itself. My other friends, who are Americans and not Buddhists, suggest that I am perhaps not buying enough stuff, and that if I strive to consume more I can eventually find happiness. Perhaps these "targeted ads" of which you speak are just the thing to show me the way to more and better consumption?

Mourn the loss of your profit model and go home.

[mary_will_grow]

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?

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

[hal2814]

Though I see your point, I could understand wanting to see what people are downloading illegally. For example, something like this may have given Fox a little more of a clue that people were still interested in Family Guy before its Seasons 1 and 2 DVD release. FG was all over the P2P networks ever since it was canned the first time around. If I worked at Fox and got an inkling of how popular that show was on P2P, I might've done something to speed along its revival.

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.

BCDash, soon to be followed by..

[Celestial Avenger]

BCCrash, the program that eliminates BCDash's tracking capabilities.

New?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

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

a better proposal...

[LunaticTippy]

I'm going to copyright my emule usage. Then the RIAA can expect a nice lawsuit when they try to use these stats.

Wired article, October 2003

[AndroidCat]

BigChampagne is Watching You.

Fantastic opportunity for a prank here

[Weaselmancer]

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?

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.