Nielsen Hugely Underestimates BitTorrent Traffic
Written by Ernesto on May 31, 2009BitTorrent’s user base is growing month by month and has reached a level where reputable marketing research companies have started to look into the phenomenon. Over the years Nielsen Media has optimized their ratings system for television, radio and films – but on the other hand their BitTorrent traffic estimates are far from accurate.
Nielsen, one of the largest market research companies worldwide is probably best known for their TV-show ratings in the US. However, they’re also looking into less old fashioned media outlets such as BitTorrent. Most recently, they say they have found an interesting trend in Australia.
“Total visits by Australians to BitTorrent websites including Mininova, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, TorrentReactor and Torrentz grew from 785,000 in April last year to 1,049,000 in April this year, Nielsen says. This is a year-on-year increase of 33.6 percent,” The Age wrote a few days ago.
This may sound like a lot of traffic, but since Nielsen reports the number of visits and not the unique visitors we expected it to be much higher. Luckily, Mininova was kind enough to give us some insight into their statistics so we could check how accurate Nielsen’s estimates are. The results are quite a shock.
When we look at the statistics of Mininova alone, we see that the site had 6,268,969 Aussie visits in April and a massive 33,162,846 Aussie page views. Compared to the same month in 2008 (4,144,556 visits), this is an increase of more than 50 percent.
So, the Australian visitors to Mininova alone are already 600% higher than Nielsen’s estimates of the total traffic to Mininova, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, TorrentReactor and Torrentz. Unfortunately we don’t have any details on the methodology or sample Nielsen used, but it’s certainly not very representative.
Perhaps even more worrying, The Age attributes the surge in traffic to the economic downturn, without providing any evidence for a causal relationship between the two events. Over the past 5 years most BitTorrent sites have seen huge traffic increases every year, also when the economy was in an upswing.
Even more so, the money generated by (legal and illegal) use of BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks is greater than the combined revenue of the various entertainment industry bodies who try to stop piracy. One could argue that without piracy the whole economy would collapse.
The downloading itself is not so much about cost saving. In Australia, BitTorrent is especially popular among those who want to catch up with US television shows that appear months or years later on TV down under. Money is not so much of an issue for them, they simply want to see the latest Lost or Heroes episodes.
Previously: Search For Movie Piracy Equipment Was Invasion of Privacy
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47 Responses
Well in lads!
“One could argue that without piracy the whole economy would collapse. ” —> thats way overboard….
“One could argue that without piracy the whole economy would collapse.” – ??? You do realize that 95% of businesses use legal software, and they are what businesses are built upon. Not casual user.
You do realize that who foots the bill in the end is 100% the costumer and not the casual business
Besides I think the article is being ironic with the claims that the entertaiment industry makes about the end of civilization as we know it LoL
Crikey a dingo..
I think the mini nova stats are wrong, with the introduction of their anti-pirate software i have stop visiting their site for over 2 months and many Aussie users would have as well.
“I think the mini nova stats are wrong, with the introduction of their anti-pirate software i have stop visiting their site for over 2 months and many Aussie users would have as well.”
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the introduced the anti-pirate software about a month ago.
There is no decline in users, which was not expected. People still use Mininova for their stuff.There are only less results.
@Jonnara: What You think is not important in this matter. They have automatic tools that checks the traffic and you can’t really argue with these statistics. They own a site and they monitor it’s visitors – if they say that “site had 6,268,969 Aussie visits in April”, it means it really had. Doesn’t matter if You alone stoped visitnig them – they still have a lot australian viewers.
As an australian, most of the shows I download the day after they show up on torrent sites are broadcast months later, even years for less popular shows.
Movie releases are appallingly slow as well – often I’m able to download a DVDrip before a cinematic release.
Though I will see a movie at the cinema if they have a worldwide release, the content owners have blocked the release of time-shifting products like TiVo for television shows for years, pushing fans like me towards torrent sites where I can get access to these shows.
BitTorrent provides me with the product I want when I want it – until there’s a legitimate source that lets me what the UK and US tv shows whenever I have the time, I’ll continue to use it. just like every other Australian sick of local broadcasters mucking about with the schedule.
im an aussie and bittorrent is huge in sydney, every man and his dog are on the bittorrent bandwagon, honestly the only ones who buy cd’s are dumb old people. wow thoough if someone tried to sue a filesharer in australia there would be a violent uproar not like in america where people seem so numb to punishment, i blame their conservative ways.
I’m Australian too Kegs. Haven’t met anyone that HASN’T used bt for pre-cinema releases or missed TV shows, but that’s only because we’re one of the last countries to view movies at the flicks.
That sucks arse big time.
Nonetheless, SBS is _my_ channel of choice but DAMN Top Gear Australia hasn’t hit the groove yet (except for the challenges — they’re a hoot XD ), which is why I torrent the original series.
Neilsen only reports what their clients pay them to. If you happen to catch the last two seconds of an ad while fast forwarding through commercials, they count it as watching two 30 second ads. When they report the traffic to online video sites, they only include the Hollywood ones to make them seem more successful. This is all about trying to make p2p look less popular than their weak solutions.
I used to record shows I liked on VHS tapes and keep them. Of course video tapes degrade with age. Now I download the episodes of shows I like and keep them. These have the commercials edited out, but it’s not like I watched the ones on my tapes anyway. Also, if I miss an episode of a show, I don’t have to call everyone I know asking if someone recorded it. I wish I’d been doing this years ago as there are several shows that I didn’t record and which completely vanished from the face of the Earth after they were aired.
I also download shows that aren’t even aired in the US.
Nielsen Schmielsen. Why should I care? Seriously. I’m not even curious. It’s not going to determine what I do or don’t visit, watch, etc. Whatever indeed.
Estimates are merely estimates. The bottom line is there is this massive trend, and this is an indications of what consumers want. They want things instantly and on demand and they want to do whatever they want with it. They don’t like restrictions.
This is whether the stuff is free or if they’ve paid for it. It’s up to the RIAA/MPAA to figure out a way to please everyone.
Put a stop to trying to control us, and perhaps then we’ll have a truce and a peaceful co-existance and maybe we’ll start buying things again. Don’t call us thieves and don’t extort from old ladies, disabled people and college students, and maybe then even more of us will be more than happy to spend money on music and movies again. Don’t bribe judges and politicians to further exacerbate relations between you and your customers because you’re just going to destroy yourself.
Do car manufacturers sue their customers for lending out their car? Do they place limitations on where you can go or what you can do with it? No. If they did, no one would buy their cars. The analogy is the same for movies and music.
Be good to the hand that feeds you. So far they’ve been biting and ripping off our fingers.
@piratelover
As an American, we know we can’t do anything even with violent uproars, the police will just shoot tear gas and rubber bullets and get us all to behave. The young people of America, are not as conservative as you might think. However the people who inhabit this country have been born into an oppressive system where corporations rule everything. Paradoxically, individual freedom means a lot to Americans, but the individual means nothing to America. We are not numb to punishment, we are restrained by our individualism. If collective individualism results in a gathering of like-minded people working towards a cause that is looked down upon by the corporate interests, the group will get slammed by the media, broken up by police and sued to high heaven. We don’t just sit back and take this sort of punishment, nor are we numb to it. We are simply in a place where there’s nothing we can do to stop it. The systems are already in place, and any group looking to reform these systems will be destroyed.
I Poo Poo this idea…
@8 NDyA
Now the Mini Nova has commercial interest and money is now involved what makes you think they can’t play with the numbers?
PS- most of us Aussies visit mini nova for the TV shows are per above comments.
If we click on a tv .torrent file and get a page return saying the torrent has been removed.
Isn’t it logical to go another site – like EZTV’s direct site for example. Hence reasonable to come to the conclusion mini’s traffic may not be going up?
Ill agree its wanting to see the latest shows driving a portion of the downloading.
For awhile I was downloading bsg and heroes due to the lag between them airing in the states and in New Zealand (same with alot of japanese media).
I know of many people who download stuff simply because its not available here.
The movie situation has improved somewhat though and I find myself visiting theatres more because the movies come out about the same time, sometimes earlier than elsewhere.
Maybe the dingo ate your baby.
Oops. I forgot mininova is now a puppet for the RIAA/MPAA.
That was my bad.
Pfft, the rest of my country uses public sites?
i wanna know the number of us using private trackers
“the money generated by (legal and illegal) use of BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks is greater than the combined revenue of the various entertainment industry bodies who try to stop piracy. One could argue that without piracy the whole economy would collapse.”
Yes, people use computers, mobile phones, satellite dishes, communication networks, Ipods, etc in conjunction with pirated files. No, that doesn’t mean all of those things would stop existing if it weren’t for piracy. But that’s the premise those numbers are based on.
The disparity is very surprising.
All all the companies who publish stats like this, I have the most faith in Neilsen, because they primarily rely on data obtained from ISP’s to calculate their totals, where as others rely on panels or plugins alone.
In Australia for memory, Neilsen gets data from Telstra’s Bigpond, our largest ISP, along with a range of smaller players, so there shouldn’t be anywhere near this gap.
Unless they aren’t being given all the data to begin within. Given the iiNet trial, and the interest the record and movie industries have in this sort of data, perhaps some ISP’s in Australia who supply data to Neilsen are removing torrent related data from their lists before hand? I have no evidence in that regard, but it would make sense: while most ISP’s are supportive of iiNet in the current Federal Court case, none of them wants to be the next company to be sued either. Not handing over data (even anonymous data) could simply be protection on a just in case basis. It’s not inconceivable that the record industry could obtain the said data from Neilsen directly (be it through court order), bypassing the ISPs, a risk worth avoiding.
I live in Australia, and I can tell you, I’m responsible for the increase in torrent use here. I was so angry about anti-piracy wankers and pro-copyright knobs, that I punched the internet 4 years into the future.
@16
Don’t explain yourself to those stupid anti Americans. Just ask why do people from every coutry move here for a better life. Don’t explain who you voted for or why because a majority of people complaining on this site are usually late teens that know nothing about politics other than what they read on sites like this.
This article isn’t even about that. I agree with Aussies downloading. If a show airs up to a year later than other countries then what do they expect.
The main problem is distribution companies and broadcast companies. Sometimes as a media company it is hard to find a tv channel willing to broadcast your show unless you can prove that it makes money in other countries first, then they’re willing to buy the program. Stupid really. But business model that seems to work.
Would you cancel your cable if you could watch your favorite shows on the internet. Of course
ten years or more wud need tu wayt for shows like breaking bad and you realy fink you had any schange tu go and see the Nurse Jackie or In Plain Sight same time ther ar some shiti games 08 that had good promo in side was total crap
What do you expect? Charts and market research companies receive huge amount of money from the intellectual property industry. That’s when they’re not directly owned by the media companies.
So usually their studies are extremely biased when they’re related to piracy, and they rarely publish their methodologies or any significant data about the studies, just the results they want.
PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and GfK are probably the best example. They produce a good amount of the piracy studies that are published in the press. Everytime I researched about the funding of those studies I found they were financed by intellectual property lobbies.
Has anyone cared to notice Australia has, what, 20 million people, and 10 million active internet users?
that perceptric link you gave is way off too though
Case in point. My wife and I have watched the complete first season of Dollhouse as it aired in the US. I have only just read today that Dollhouse will be coming to Fox8.
Without Channel BT we would still not be able to watch this series since we don’t subscribe to Foxtel here (which is a complete waste of money).
So no one should be surprised why Australians are such big downloaders of media content.
Quote by Anonymous,
“Besides I think the article is being ironic with the claims that the entertaiment industry makes about the end of civilization as we know it LoL”
Well our generation right now relays on entertainment as the primary source of escape and stress reliever. Now if that industry crashes, or lets just say all illegal bit torrent downloading is 100% banned and anyone who does uses will get easily tracked and sentenced 10 years. So people would stop because the internet is being monitored by governments and with highly elite tracking software. So lets say that happened, meaning people will ether pay for content more, or just have a lot less entertainment in their life. So those people who cannot afford any paid entertainment content, they would just get hobbies like reading which i consider a much cheaper source of entertainment, or exercising, or who knows some crazies wont be smart enough to replace mainstream paid entertainment [tv, movies, video games, music, which can be very expensive] to look into other ways for entertainment and start going postal of having no way in escaping reality for a short time in a day to relieve stress. All types of crimes would go up, [educated guess of 10%-15%].
@27
“Just ask why do people from every coutry move here for a better life.”
XD
If I wanted to go the better life I would move to a place like Sweden or Japan. The only upside to America is your gun laws. Still, awesome internets + hot chicks > guns.
I love the Big Mac :)
And that is just for the Au, where they are one of the worst places in the world for allowable Gb per month in their plans.
maybe it’s the gb used just to download the pages (not the torrents) ;)
lmfao @ 37 poking 36
Short, sweet, funny – I like it XD
The downloading itself is not so much about cost saving. In Australia, BitTorrent is especially popular among those who want to catch up with US television shows that appear months or years later on TV down under. Money is not so much of an issue for them, they simply want to see the latest Lost or Heroes episodes.
THIS IS VERY TRUE
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I’d say that is a MAJOR under estimate!
RT
privacy-tools.echoz.com
Unique visitors # should be lower than total visitors as total visitors can be duplicated (ie same person twice). Unique is more accurate and has to be smaller that total visitors. Ur numbers are out of whack.
@33:
To a degree I guess you are right maybe it gets bad, but once it does people will find a way that will suit them and their needs. Society is a complex system and dynamic it’s nothing like the entertainment industry, look at the example of the software industry they battle piracy in the 80’s too and were successful to a point and it was getting harder and harder to have illegal software then something amazing happened people got together to develop stuff that they didn’t have the money to pay for it and one guy showed how to use the law to protect the freedoms of the people(Thank you Stallman) and a kid(Thank you Torvalds) living with his parents working alone impacted the OS market 10 years latter this things were born out of necessity to restore balance in the system, which benefited not only society but business everywhere and I believe that the same thing will happen with arts and that is why I don’t concern myself very much. People will start doing things on their own and create new models. It’s great that the industry go postal on society and make fantastic claims that no one can prove because people get tired and start making things for themselves, and this is the turning point when people start making their on things and turning their backs to those who hurt them. It will happen if the industry continue just wait and see.
Personally I put this in the ‘No $H1T Sherlock!’ catagory. For years I have been going to torrents for my TV shows. Either because:
1 -the show I want to watch does not air in my local (Canada)
2 -They will air it here months later (if not a year – Looking at you BBC),
3 – I’ve missed it (either I was out, forgot or the network moved it to another time-slot)
4 – I have a life and go out Fridays with Friends. Why put the shows I want to watch on that night? You want them to fail??
5 – I wanted to download the episodes and keep them until the DVD comes out.
6 – Your movie looks like crap and I don’t want to spend $12 (CDN movie price) to find out that surprise it is!! If the movie looks good I will always go with friends and family to watch first.
The networks need to wake up and really see how people are using the internet for their TV fix. Instead of them trying to tell us how we should use it, let us tell them. They must adapt in this new market place, not us. Internet gives us the power not them.
Look at Hulu. They have been screwing people with their own system for viewing the shows online. Why? The people who watch will even sit and watch the commercials at the start. They just want to control the app they watch it with. The people just want to watch their shows. So instead of making people happy, they screw them for control and the thought that they are losing money.
Also even though in Canada we ALSO carry the main US stations (ABC, CBC, NBC and FOX) Hulu will not allow canadians to watch. Why? We still buy the same products that your commercials advertise for, I could watch the show on my local FREE network who also carries the show. But no. Its all a power trip.
So until the networks and hollywood smarten up. I will be getting torrents of my TV shows.
Sadly, the shows that people torrent (Sarah Conner, Stargates, Arrested Development, Chuck and many others) still rely on neilson to get their ratings. Therefore they have low raitings and get cancelled. Great shows, plenty of fans wanting to watch, but a system where the people in charge have no clue what the real world does to see their programs.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
“So, the Australian visitors to Mininova alone are already 600% higher than Nielsen’s estimates of the total traffic to [..]”
Comparing numbers 1,049,000 and 6,268,969 this is wrong. It’s either _500%_ higher than or 600% _of_ Nielsens estimates.
Just FYI. =)
Another Aussie here who rarely watches free-to-air TV (except for the occasions where an Aussie-produced show is worth watching) and scoffs at his friends paying for cable yet still can’t get close to the breadth of shows available via P2P…
lets all take a moment to thank the socially retarded individuals who cap these shows for us! I hope they’re getting paid somewhere along the line…
”The downloading itself is not so much about cost saving. In Australia, BitTorrent is especially popular among those who want to catch up with US television shows that appear months or years later on TV down under. Money is not so much of an issue for them, they simply want to see the latest Lost or Heroes episodes.”
I think a lot of us feel the same way. Being from the U.K, its always been about seeing shows as soon as possible, until I can buy them on dvd, not about money. The very fact bit torrent works shows the possibilities online. Worrying about licensing issues online is a bit silly, but the way to change this is for content providers to have global licenses instead, then apply per region advertising to each DL country. You’ll find some websites do this when you visit them.
If only Nielsen would track this stuff fairly, and perhaps take online popularity into account, next to regional tv viewing, then maybe less tv shows would be cancelled.
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