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How Do Seeders Profit From BitTorrent?
arcticstoat writes "As you may remember, a recent study claimed that just 100 users were responsible for downloading 75% of BitTorrent content, and were doing it for money, raising a lot of questions about the study. How do you profit from seeding, and how can the same 100 users be responsible for 75% of downloading and 66% of uploading. The details of the study are clarified in an interview with one of the key researchers, showing that the study's actual statistic is that 66% of the original seeds indexed on the Pirate Bay come from just 100 users, and these seeds then go on to account for 75% of downloads. The interview also details how it's possible for this small number of seeders to make a profit from seeding, via embedding links to their own indexing sites in the filenames and bundled TXT files, which then get money from advertising if downloaders decide to visit the site, assured of quality downloads. Meanwhile, other ways of profiting include 'premium' registered accounts."
_AGAIN_ with this nonsense?
I strongly doubt anyone is getting rich from the trickle of people who actually go to the URLs found in torrent info files. They seem to be more for notoriety than profit.
Yes, the trackers make money of the ads.. but unless there is some secret backroom deal where TPB and others funnel money to axxo and friends.. I don’t see the corollary between index site traffic and motivation for users to seed.
People do it for the e-pene. People were (and still are) doing this on IRC long before there was any way to make a profit. People insist on keeping their share ratios up, even when not required... and they see no profit either.
And the interview doesn’t _detail_ anything. It quickly explains some very shallow “research” with plenty of bias, then makes a pretty dubious guess, and finally proceeds to make an even lamer admonishment of people who illegally download.
_AND_ using TPB and Mininova as your main source of data good grief.
This isn't a few guys who've had a look at what's happening on BitTorrent a couple of times and made notes
Weird... cause that’s exactly what it feels like. This thing reads like some high school kid’s half assed research project. They grabbed some data.. made a bunch of broad assumptions.. then proceeded to unsubstantiated correlations.
This whole “study” is a complete joke. If these researchers had any brains they’d just let this thing quietly die and move onto something else.
Most (all?) private trackers that I use absolutely forbid any advertising in the torrent. For the most part the rules on the private trackers dictate untouched scene releases. Some allow for unrarring of the goodies but the nfo and other scene-sourced stuff must remain intact.
Public trackers are another matter completely.
Trolling is a art,
None of the porn I download has any sort of ads, links or otherwise. Who's making money off this mythical advertisement?
Should replace "profit" with "make money" since that's all the articles seem to care about. There are lots of ways to "profit" from something, without ever making a single cent of actual money. Maybe it's cred, maybe it's favors, maybe it's admission into a special group, maybe it's blowjobs, who knows... Just because indexing sites sell ad space doesn't mean that the seeders are making money.
I've downloaded a few e-books (PDFs) and upon opening them, were greeted with the seeder's or creator's homepage (or affiliate URL). One of the books I downloaded was about day trading. The person who put together the PDF injected his homepage and services in the first 2 pages of the book. Does he make money? Who knows. Does he get a few visits to his website for a bit of work? Yup.
I don't frequent /. very often these days but whenever I do one thing always strikes me: "News for nerds" yet your editorial work IMO shows that you're losing touch with the "nerd factor" over time.
Take this article.. BT lives on seeders and leechers (who, during leeching, also seed though it maybe little). The headline includes /all/ seeders of a torrent whereas the article clearly speaks of "original seeders". There is a huge difference, but even that important detail is left out of the summary.
As to the study results themselves, I think they're flawed. The stuff I read only focuses on the amount of entries. Sure; some persons can easily be responsible for that. The real question here is who keeps those swarms alive, sometimes several years after the original upload (upload "into" the swarm so to say)?
The original seeders? I very much doubt that!
So why aren't those people counted?
"via embedding links to their own indexing sites in the filenames and bundled TXT files"
Ah, those would be the text files that I uncheck before I start the download, ensuring that they never reach my computer.
If I'm downloading a torrent for one file, and there are other files in the torrent, they all get unchecked first.
I didn't knew that when people were not R[ing]TFA (or actually RTFPaper), it was worth a repost when someone who actually read the paper would talk about it.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
to try to find a more concrete reason to go after bittorrent. Everyone's tired of hearing them whine about the zillions of dollars they're losing from the violation of their imaginary property. Usually Plan B involves showing how someone, somewhere is making money. (someone's making money off their IP, they want a cut, ok I get that) But this doesn't work for bittorrent because nobody's making money on it. But they're going to give it a go anyway.
Trying to insult peoples' intelligence tends to LOWER your credibility and sympathy, not raise it. You'd think they'd learn. No, on second thought, they never do learn, do they?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I've always suspected it to be competing businesses, i.e. Windows 7 gets released, Apple secretly pays to have it cracked and seeded. They have the money and plenty of reason to do it, making them chief suspects.
The author seems to operate with the assumption that the only motive for one person to do so much "work" is profit. My observation is that a lot of torrents are put up by old piracy groups (games are cracked and distributed by RAZOR, as one example). Shows are often put up by similar groups with their own communities. These groups tend to have a small number of members who are responsible for uploading the content. They are just one part of a much larger content distribution machine.
People do it for the e-pene.
I had to google e-pene and I got Epene stationary company of China.
They're doing it for the stationary?
I never profited a dime from my seeding activities, but then that was never even a secondary goal of doing it in the first place... quite the opposite. It was anti-greed or anti-capitalism.
..and I tell you, the advertisements on the site where the torrents can be downloaded make no money worth mentioning. It doesn't even fully cover the server cost, seeding does cost money. And that's limiting the content to public domain and creative commons, advertisements make nothing close to what is requred in order to buy quality content. Keep in mind that this is a site where torrents can be downloaded which also does seeding of those torrents, I really do not see how those who just upload some file to some torrent site and seed it make any money at all. If I owned TPB and I uploaded files to TPB and seeded them then that would generate profit, but that's different than random strangers uploading some file.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Private trackers, which require invitations to join, are where many of these people make their money. The sites are ratio-based, and leeching to the point where you have an unfavorable ratio will result in you getting banned. These sites are generally much faster than public torrent sites (TPB, etc.) as they employ users with seedboxes (with 0sec files and access to extremely fast internet connections, often 100Mbit and sometimes even 1Gbit+) to seed the files to other users. People pay, err, 'donate' to the site in order for upload credit, and a chunk of that money goes to the owners of those seedboxes. When a user wants the newest copy of Gulliver's Travels, and is either too lazy to seed back or lacks the ability to do so (mediocre upload speeds - thanks crappy US ISPs!), it is often reasonable to use this process -- after all, spending $1 USD for 2GB of upload credit makes a lot more sense financially than dropping $60 to take a family of four to the movie theater. Multiply this by thousands or even tens of thousands of users, at a dozen or so movies/TV shows/pieces of software per month, and this quickly becomes a very lucrative business.
You pay for a seedhost. They do the torrenting for you and you simply download what you want directly from them while they boost your ratio.
They're using their grammar skills there.
No way. When I'm downloading something from a torrent, I always seed. Sometimes I seed after the downloads have completed. I think this is pretty typical of BT users. That means that MOST users are also seeding most of the time. Since many users are downloading the most popular content, they are also uploading the most popular content. That's how it's supposed to work.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
you know how you can train those gray cells in your head (to have more interconnections)?
same goes for your internets.
tom-dick-and-harrys internet connection just goes to google, facebook and youtube (and some pr0n sites).
but if you're a seeder, you can be sure that those BGP internods know you IP-address by name
and if one of your packets should enter said fine establishment, you can be sure that the BGP bar-tender
will greet it by name and serve you a (free) beer before even attending to the douch-trio : D
None of the porn I download has any sort of ads, links or otherwise. Who's making money off this mythical advertisement?
The whips and chain industry.
Balmer: Sir, there is a new threat facing us, Open Source.
Gates: No bother, we'll just rip off what they do and when they sue us we'll buy the company.
Balmer: It doesn't work that way. They're busy trying to emulate the look and feel of Windows. They're ripping us off.
Gates: Then we'll sue them.
Balmer: There's no company to sue.
Gates: If we can't buy them or sue them, what are we supposed to do? Let's go after the programmers. Surely we can pay them more than they're making right now.
Balmer: They're not making anything right now.
Gates: What? Preposterous! Anything worth doing is worth doing for money. What could possibly motivate them?
Balmer: Love and the respect of their peers. I assure you I am as baffled as you are.
Most of this stuff was done as a hobby, for bragging rights. It's like any other kind of hobby people get involved in. People were surfing and rock climbing and flying model airplanes long before there was any sort of sponsorship involved and sponsorships were basically from companies looking to cash in from association with the hobby, either trying to become a lifestyle brand like soda companies aligning themselves with extreeeeeeeeeme! sports or actual suppliers of the equipment wanting to get their name out amongst the participating amateurs.
The mistake these people are making is assuming that what motivates them motivates others. Usually it happens the other way around, people doing it for the love getting disillusioned by those doing it for the money so it's always nice to see it go the other way around for a change.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I always figured it was about spreading malware. People who are willing to download software from unknown sources on the Internet seem like easy targets to me. Install pirate Diablo II, get a free keylogger!
In a world where most people cannot fathom an action instigated by something other greed, it is not surprising to see these sorts of articles. Just like the "loose-knit organization of malicious hackers" (lol!) called Anonymous, file sharers (or at least their motives) will never be understood by the general public.
Holy crap, hosted bittorrent seeding servers ("seedhosts") exist ... and people pay for them?
That could explain a lot of the lopsidedness in the numbers.
I would hope that seedhost businesses make generous donations to the EFF and similar organizations that work to protect and improve the legality of media sharing; were I in that business, I'd make that a selling point, e.g. "5% of proceeds are donated to the EFF."
Also, doesn't boosting your ratio not matter unless you're in a gated BT community that maintains a minimum ratio?
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I think seeds are mostly from people with a sense of fairness. It's not really pure altruism. I upload at least as much as I download because the whole system is not sustainable otherwise (essentially a selfish motive). I don't believe in taking from the swarm more than I am giving back. It's true that quite a few people don't care, which is probably one reason why all torrents eventually die. But there are enough people with a sense of fairness to make the system mostly work. It's really about trading. The swarm gives me a copy of the movie/game/CD and I feel compelled to give back at least as much data as I was given. I guess it's an honor system of sorts. I think many or even most people wouldn't steal stuff even if they thought they wouldn't be caught.
It's that same sense of fairness that powers bittorrent and also motivates some people to buy content instead of downloading it. I do both. I download everything first to try it. If I like it then I buy the usually higher quality paid version. Games/software are the exception because the paid version is actually lower quality than the downloaded one due to draconian DRM. I only purchase DRM-free software, which basically doesn't exist anymore.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
The results would only surprise those who don't know anything about how informal media markets are structured. These people didn't do their homework. Read: b-bstf. (2004). A Guide To Internet Piracy. 2600 Hacker Quarterly Summer. http://web.archive.org/web/20070512002747/old.wheresthebeef.co.uk/show.php/guide/2600_Guide_to_Internet_Piracy-TYDJ.txt and Howe, J. (2005): The Shadow Internet Wired http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/topsite.html This is why you need social scientists (sociologists, anthropologists, media and communications studies people) in a group of engineers and statisticians to conducts such studies.
If I was running **AA, I'd hire a PR firm to create the appearance that downloading takes place for profit. Planting such text files, though silly, might achieve just that. Even though it's easier to shut such sites down (but expensive), I stand to profit more from creating the appearance that "pirates" are not so innocent and allowing the sites to continue.
Canadian RIAA has been claiming that Canadian laws are inadequate while dragging its feet before suing IsoHunt: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5636/135/
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell