Comment on 'The Last of Us' Was the Most-Pirated Show of 2023

• Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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. 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.

  source

  • subtext@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Torrent Freak is not a piracy website. They are a news publication that talks about torrenting and piracy. They describe themselves as follows:

    TorrentFreak is a publication dedicated to bringing the latest news about copyright, privacy, and everything related to filesharing. We are not a news aggregator but focus on unique and fresh stories. TorrentFreak is where news and copyright issues collide.

    For this specific article, they mention that they

    estimated based on sample data from several sources, including I Know.

    The source article in question:

    torrentfreak.com/the-last-of-us-is-the-most-pirat…

    source

    • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Ah, my bad. Could have sworn they were an indexer; but it’s been a few years since I’ve used torrents.

      “several sources” is rather… ‘trust us’. Not a fan of that kind of reporting. But I know what you download is something at least.

      That expands the scope to several public indexer sites instead of just one, but it’s still only public peer-to-peer (torrent) traffic being measured. Usenet, direct download, private/pirate streaming, and private peer-to-peer are still left out.

      source

      • subtext@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Oh for sure, it’s pretty hand wavey, and doesn’t cover everything, but it’s at least something!

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      • admin@lemmy.my-box.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        So, back to the original question: what makes you think that using public torrent trackers are not representative of the bigger picture?

        Yes, obviously not being able to use private stats from private sources narrows the scope, but what makes you think it cannot be extrapolated? Personally, I think that private trackers or usenet would paint the same picture, and niche providers would be too small to make a dent in the stats.

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