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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.
None of the porn I download has any sort of ads, links or otherwise. Who's making money off this mythical advertisement?
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?