Most Popular P2P Files: PeerMind

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1. Klim
   

   April 17th, 2006 at 10:40 am

   The design is appealing, and I like the comparison chart animations. Interesting information, but “Yuck” is right.

2. Gaurav Oberoi
   

   April 17th, 2006 at 10:47 am

   Big Champagne is a company that has been mining P2P data for over 5 years. Unlike PeerMind, their target market are folks in the music business (record companies, agents for artists etc.), who pay them subscription fees for access to this data, and analysis to find trends (e.g. what are people in Seattle listening to?).

   Now they are expanding to analysing data from more than just P2P feeds (their site mentions getting data from Nielsen ratings).

   It would be easy for them to enter PeerMind’s space, though given that their current monetization strategy is already quite strong, I’m not sure how motivated they would be.

   Here’s an 2003 Wired article about them. Lots more press links from their site.

3. Jason Coleman
   

   April 17th, 2006 at 11:05 am

   First, I think PeerMind is really cool and has a ton of potential for marketing research among other things. And I agree that this would be a great indicator of music demand, but it may not be as good an indicator for movie downloads.

   To be honest, it’s been a while since I’ve downloaded a movie from P2P; so things may have changed. However, I believe that for movies, both the quality and availability of the pirated material still has an effect on download numbers. While Ice Age 2 may have been downloaded more often than King Kong, that might be due to the fact that a pristine copy of the movie came out early while the only available versions of King Kong (before the DVD release) were made from someone sneaking a video recorder into the theatre. (That’s just an example and not necessarily the case for those two movies.) Of course the trend towards simultaneous Theatre and DVD releases may abate this issue somewhat.

   Also, file size could even have an effect on overall download numbers. King Kong was a LONG movie and probably twice the file size of Ice Age 2. In addition, animated movies might compress better than live action movies due to the bright solid colors.

   Again, I think the site is cool. Just pointing out a caveat to the movie data (one that might possibly ameliorate your “yuck” feeling).

4. Michael Arrington
   

   April 17th, 2006 at 11:08 am

   Jason, that’s a good point on the movie stats, and I agree. King Kong wasn’t all that good though, either.

5. Vikram Pant
   

   April 17th, 2006 at 11:12 am

   My question is about the Bittorrent link that reads “soon”, are they really going to implement that?

   Doesn’t that take this site that seems like a little P2P tracker and shows us what is hot in cyber pop culture and make it an enabler of illegal downloads?

6. Saul Weiner
   

   April 17th, 2006 at 11:59 am

   The site is loading slowly for me and rendering funny in Firefox.

   Does this service really have a future with all th ehoopla about the legality of bittorrent and p2p services?

7. Billy Warhol
   

   April 17th, 2006 at 12:46 pm

   Yeah that is a pretty sad & lame reflection on a large portion of society fer sure*

   sigh……

   on a good note Don’t Cha!! by the Pussycat Dolls made the Top Ten!!

   other than visiting Strip Clubs i wouldn’t have been aware of this wonderful song!!

   ;))

   i saw on Software - Alcohol 120% ???

   whass that???

   sounds like a wonderful Software Solution!!!! especially fer Corporate Offices!!

   Cheers!! Billy ;))

8. Bill Minton
   

   April 17th, 2006 at 1:50 pm

   So much for all the claims about people using P2P for legal DL’s ‘eh?

9. Chris Budy
   

   April 17th, 2006 at 2:45 pm

   It definately gives an idea as to what’s being downloaded, but there’s also another factor.

   The fact that people don’t want to pay for things they’d be ‘ashamed’ of buying. Or they don’t think it’s that great and don’t want to spend money to buy it.

   Oh, but I can download that crappy song/movie online for free? Sure I’ll go ahead and grab that, my kid/wife/gf/etc. will like it too.

10. Ben
    

    April 17th, 2006 at 2:54 pm

    I think it has great potential….but where is the rss feed??? I certainly don’t want more emails but a feed would be good.

11. Daniele Levy
    

    April 17th, 2006 at 5:24 pm

    The cahrt above reminds me of those statistics you see about the ‘most often stolen cars in San Francisco’ or something along those lines. There are plenty of legal applications for P2P technology and downloading Ice Age 2 while it’s still in the theaters is not one of them. I am afraid that the chart above just reinforces illegal behavior which gives P2P overall a bad rap.

12. Thund3r
    

    April 17th, 2006 at 10:24 pm

    I’m generally pretty fond of TechCrunch’s reviews, but the last paragraph of your article does a disservice to the discourse by being so judgmental on the public’s taste in music and movies. While some of us may cringe at what is “popular” music, we should keep an objective frame of mind and pay attention to what the masses are consuming.

13. Michael Arrington
    

    April 17th, 2006 at 11:06 pm

    Thund3r - I appreciate your comment, but I strive to be everything except objective in my writing.

14. Blaze
    

    April 18th, 2006 at 1:28 am

    Alcohol 120% burns isos and loads virtual cd’s onto a vitrual drive on your computer. Good for downloaded iso’s you want to run without burning an actual cd.

    I do agree with both Daniele and Thund3r’s comments too. I was thinking the same things.

15. matt
    

    April 18th, 2006 at 1:35 am

    I am with Thund3r with regards to the last paragraph of your review.

16. Patrick
    

    April 18th, 2006 at 11:27 am

    For a media firm, the top 10 or even top 25 songs traded by p2p isn’t all that useful. All the artists in that category are well funded and publicized. With music, a media firm wants to know what bands are under the radar but still being heavily p2p trafficked. Those are the bands that a music label wants to sign and produce to become the next big thing.

    Movies are a completely different arena. p2p movie downloads are correlated with older movies that have been released to DVD. Look at the top 25 movies at Peer Mind - they’re almost all DVD releases. What’s all this mean? Despite everything the MPAA says, people want to see new movies in theaters. However, there’s a huge long-tail market for older and less popular movies. These are the movies that people don’t mind spending a bit of time and effort on p2p networks so they can watch the movie on computer screens. That top 25 movies list? That’s your video-on-demand market right there! Every movie on that list is lost revenue. If any movie exec had a brain, they’d make those movies available for download over the iTunes Music Store at say $2 or $3 a pop. It’s cheap enough to make a p2p downloader think twice before hitting the networks. boom!