Content Kings Look Away Now

TorrentFreak gives us a figure sure to chill the blood of content kings everywhere: "75 percent of all traffic on the Internet is due to file sharing, with 59 percent of that file sharing attributed to people swapping video files. Music tracks account for 33 percent of the file-sharing traffic. E-mail, it turns out, accounts for just 9 percent of the total traffic. The total internet traffic is a brain-twisting 40 petabytes - a 4 followed by 16 zeros."

Comments

[Steve Bowbrick]

I've always been suspicious of this data. It badly needs weighting - otherwise it's like the airline safety numbers: calculated by fatalities per trip or fatalities per passenger mile...

Anyway, since *every single* file sharing transaction is a multi-megabyte (or multi-gigabyte) deal and since emails and other communications transactions are teeny tiny (a few kilobytes usually - how big is a Twitter update?) I'd like to see the numbers recalculated on a per transaction basis. I think we'd see very different numbers. To be specific I think we'd see that the vast bulk of Internet traffic is what it's supposed to be: communication.

Also, since the price of bandwidth is doing the asymptotic thing I don't think we'll be worrying about the cost of individual transactions for very long - a txt message will cost roughly the same as a DVD image to transmit. This kind of worry will go away all together (I imagine people used to have similar concerns in the early days of electrical distribution: "the vast bulk of demand for current is electric fires and toasters. Something must be done!")

[James Cherkoff]

Thanks Steve, yes it's certainly a bit of a murky underworld but when I speak to people for whom downloading TV is the norm I start to wonder. And my highly unscientific research would suggest that those people are no longer just A-geeks. Downloading the whole of Twin Peaks takes 2 weeks *cough* apparently.