• Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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    10 months ago

    … How would you even measure that?

    /edit: ah, popular downloads from one particular torrent provider. Not the wider picture.

    Add on pirate streams, usenet, and the other half a billion torrent sites and those numbers muddy a bit…

    • just another dev@lemmy.my-box.dev
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      10 months ago

      I don’t think it said just 1 specific torrent provider. But even then, as long as it was a decently sized generic torrent provider, what makes you think it would not be representative of the bigger picture?

      • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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        10 months ago

        They explicitly state these are Torrent Freaks numbers. Along with:

        It should be noted, as Torrent Freak does, these statistics only reflect a portion of any pirated content this year. The stats are specifically for single-episode torrents, rather than season-wide packages, and even more specifically they’re based on data from the torrenting platform BitTorrent. Just as television has grown and evolved across new formats in the last decade or so, so has piracy, with more and more people turning to sites hosting streams of pirated content, rather than “traditionally” pirating content through downloaded, local copies.

        These numbers only reflect piracy of one type and among that type only one, very public, provider. (and not even their entire community, just those that download episodes one by one) That’s quite a limited scope. Lots of pirates don’t like such public services and/or use other protocols/methods of acquiring media.

        Personally, I don’t even use Torrents at all anymore, let alone Torrent Freak, yet I pirate hundreds of hours of media every month. I’ve also been hearing far more commonly in the last few years about people using pirate streaming services instead of downloads.

        If you want the full picture, you’ve gotta expand your demographics. When you only ask the straight white men, all you get is what straight white men think, instead of the whole community’s opinion.

    • xor@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      law of large numbers: it’s probably fairly representative