New Tool Tracks Online Media Consumption 71
Carl Bialik writes "Technology and market research company BigChampagne is introducing a measurement tool called BCDash to let media companies quickly track how people -- legally or illegally -- use their products online. BigChampagne said BCDash will bring together data from AOL, Yahoo Music, iTunes, and Wal-Mart, along with estimates of illegal file sharing activity for specific titles. It's meant as a marketing tool, the WSJ reports: 'Media companies have often been caught flat-footed when a video or song takes off online. By the time they try to capitalize on it, the opportunity often has passed.'"
Real or **AA WAGs? (Score:4, Funny)
It will be interesting to see how realistic their estimates are, or if every man, woman, and child on the planet is thought to bw trying to download Ashlee Simpson's latest wailings.
Re:Real or **AA WAGs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Real or **AA WAGs? (Score:3, Insightful)
RIAA: "Our losses this year due to piracy amount to 1500-trillion dollars, we need stronger laws!"
Congressman: "That'll be another 10 billion in campaign contributions, please."
Re:Real or **AA WAGs? (Score:2)
O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
And how pray tell will you acheive this?
Root kits that phone home? IP logs from torrent sites? Or a magic 8ball? Or perhaps the good old fashioned dartboard?
Hrmm... Either they are commiting questionable practices or they are pulling magic numbers out of places where the sun don't shine.
I tend to think it will be the latter since it will be cheaper and no one who buys their service will be able to prove them wrong.
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Interesting)
1. GNUTella networks send the data through many clients before it reaches its destination. By monitoring this traffic with a modified client, one can get a reasonably good sampling of what users are searching for and/or downloading.
2. Unless the torrent is private, anyone can connect to the server and all kinds of stats on the number of seeds and leechers.
I'm not up on how Kazaa or eDonkey work, so I won't comment on those. But the very nature of these networks do make it possible to obtain useful stats.
tracking gnutella (Score:2)
Gnutella networks do not work like that. Queries and query hit messages go through the Gnutella mesh network, so it's possible to get some kind of sampling of what people are searching for as wel
Re:tracking gnutella (Score:2)
2. You will only see a tiny, tiny fraction of the hits resulting from the searches that you do see.
Neither one of these is relevant. We're talking about aquiring a statistical sample of what the populace is looking for. Having a set of nodes on different factions of the network can get you plenty to do a statistical analysis. Especially if you setup a few SuperNodes.
If all of the above happen, you may see a PUSH packet when someone tries to
Re:O RLY? (Score:2)
from the Back channel site: Using a unique mixture of technology, economics and game theory, Polyus will reduce customer churn, increase profitability, and precipitate accelerated market consolidation in the IP Telecommunications industry. [backchannel.co.uk]
Seems like there is still an element of chance and speculation in their service offering...Granted, if they're paid based on their performance,it is the end result that counts.
Re:O RLY? (Score:2, Informative)
Also, IRC, where a lot of files start their meandering paths across the internet, can also be monitored. The technology behind IRC search sites like PacketNews could be used to monitor how many people in how many channels are sharing your file, and in some cases, when files are requested with triggers in the main channel, you can
Re:O RLY? (Score:2)
Tracking "illegal" file sharing? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Tracking "illegal" file sharing? (Score:2)
Re:Tracking "illegal" file sharing? (Score:3, Funny)
What do you mean "get us to go along with..."?
Doesn't everyone like Milli Vanilli?
Why are looking at me like that?
Re:Tracking "illegal" file sharing? (Score:2)
Re:Tracking "illegal" file sharing? (Score:1)
Re:Tracking "illegal" file sharing? (Score:2)
I don't care how much you try, I really don't think you can get them to blame it on the rain.
all the best,
drew
I mean, c'mon. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I mean, c'mon. (Score:5, Interesting)
I often try to increase my quality of life by buying stuff, but usually my purchases fail to do so in any meaningful sense, or for any significant length of time. A friend of mine claims that I will never find happiness this way, and should seek other ways to improve the quality of my life. He is a Buddhist, though, and I am an American. I am also a consumer, and what is my destiny if not to consume? Clearly if I am consuming and yet remain unfulfilled, my failure must be in the consuming itself. My other friends, who are Americans and not Buddhists, suggest that I am perhaps not buying enough stuff, and that if I strive to consume more I can eventually find happiness. Perhaps these "targeted ads" of which you speak are just the thing to show me the way to more and better consumption?
Re:I mean, c'mon. (Score:1)
What about now? (Score:2)
Re:I mean, c'mon. (Score:2)
Re:I mean, c'mon. (Score:1)
Mourn the loss of your profit model and go home. (Score:4, Interesting)
Umm, think maybe its because there was NO USE FOR THEM?
When all is said and done, our economy, our government, ourselves, we all will have dedicated massive amounts of time and money subsidizing Sony's dead profit model. How come we can do that, but we can't throw amtrack a nickle or two?
Available to the masses (Score:5, Insightful)
It'd be great to see a geographic breakdown of where my friend's band is most popular. It'd be fairly novel to see musical trends e.g. a resurgance of raggae downloads in Brooklyn.
If you're going to track my data, at least make the results available to me as well.
--
Jim
http://www.runfatboy.net/ [runfatboy.net]
a better proposal... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:a better proposal... (Score:2)
Surely nobody else downloads old star trek, porn, and warez...oh, I see your point.
Doesn't belong to you... (Score:2)
Your data doesn't belong to you, didn't you read the EULA? But I'm sure you can have it for a price...
Re:Available to the masses (Score:2)
"I swear mom! I was stoned when I went to that porn site! I don't even know what porn is!"
Honestly, what good would it do if you were shown what data is collected? So you could correct it, and thereby make it even easier for companies to know more about you? (It's not like correcting your credit report so that you can get that $5000 loan you need.)
Re:Available to the masses (Score:1)
bad statistic (Score:5, Insightful)
There are people who download TONS of free and/or illegal movies, games, music, etc... but its not like all those people would be paying for them if they weren't available for free.
I think all that these stats do is give fuel for Microsoft, Metallica, and Disney to convince ignorant judges and lawyers to sue the pants off some 15 year old kid.
Am I alone in thinking so?
--
"Man Bites Dog
Then Bites Self"
Re:bad statistic (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:bad statistic (Score:2)
WRT to illegal downloading stats, all the media firms have to do is go to a torrent site or download the relevant software, and they'll see whats happening.
In fact I can't believe that they haven't done this already.
Re:bad statistic (Score:2)
"all the media firms have to do is go to a torrent site or download the relevant software, and they'll see whats happening."
Yeah, I know BitTorrent is popular and all, but it's not the only P2P system in town and it didn't have nearly the presence back then (after FG's 1st cancelling, between seasons 2
Re:bad statistic (Score:4, Insightful)
As word spreads, they'd become the FIRST place people look for media downloads, and would make a killing on micropayments. What's more, this could be automated, and after the initial setup, would be effectively free of all costs other than bandwidth. It'd be like free money falling on their heads, with all the marketing done BY the customer base.
Yeah, some of these legally-downloaded files will find their way to P2P networks, but so what? Who'd waste time scrounging P2P, and hoping to get an intact and correct download, when for 10 cents you could get the real thing, guaranteed to be a good file AND free of legal threats??
And the piracy issue could be largely eliminated by offering affiliate programs, frex:
1) you host the files and provide the bandwidth, and you get NN-percent of the payment for each file. And to thank you for hosting the files, you get free personal use of the content.
Or 2) for folks without adequate servers of their own, these affiliates could provide a web portal that links to the content owner's server, and get some smaller percentage of the payment.
If the content owners did all this, P2P piracy would largely dry up overnight -- it wouldn't be worth the effort for average folks, and getting in on the gravy train would attract a whole lot of the people who presently collect and distribute huge numbers of files just because they CAN, not because they have any real use for them.
Re:bad statistic (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is, the content middle-men will never agree with you. They want a huge cut of a huge number, not a tiny cut of a tiny number -- or even a huge cut of a tiny number.
Re:bad statistic (Score:2)
Some people can't "win" unless everybody else loses.
NYTime uses their bad statistics (Score:1)
Re:bad statistic (Score:2)
Example: It's Tuesday night, and I'm bored. How about a couple of hours of computer gaming to pass the time? Excellent! Perhaps I'll make a quick run to the store and pick up Q
BCDash, soon to be followed by.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:BCDash, soon to be followed by.. (Score:1)
Media Consumption (Score:1)
The reason the media has "taken off online" is because it is easily accessable and quickly 'obtained', not because it is locked into DRM or worse in CD format on a store shelf.
Re:Media Consumption (Score:5, Insightful)
The purpose of this tool is to harness internet downloads to find out what might be highly marketable, and what isn't. And if they can get geographic data on its popularity, they'll even be able to target their marketing in the appropriate areas.
New? (Score:4, Insightful)
Self-fullfilling tool -advertise, sell, track, adv (Score:2)
This seems to be somewhat self-fullfilling with the power of advertising, and will help the huge corporate media to get bigger and more powerful
Wired article, October 2003 (Score:2, Informative)
Fantastic opportunity for a prank here (Score:5, Interesting)
Anybody remember the MTV Total Request Live Devo prank? [72.14.203.104] TRL allows you to phone in what you want played on the show. Most popular vote gets played. Fark and a few other websites tried to get Devo's "Whip It" to get played - sort of like an online version of a flashmob.
We could do something very very similar here with something as simple as a dinky little Perl script.
All it has to do is hit your favorite P2P network that's being monitored, and make a request every so often. If you space out the requests and get a lot of people doing it, the net won't flood but the harvested data will be skewed.
I wonder what the reprecussions would be if Big Media discovered the most downloaded movie of 2006 was Brazil and the most downloaded song was Jocko Homo?
O.K. Projections are only as good as... (Score:1)
From their site: BigChampagne collects a great deal of information about media consumption both online and offline through our partners. We also employ our own patent-pending systems for observing peer-to-peer ("P2P") file sharing and searching.
This info is
Re:O.K. Projections are only as good as... (Score:1)
What, blocked several ways at my computer and router?
New Tool Tracks.... (Score:1)
Well then, nevermind...
Re:New Tool Tracks.... (Score:2)
Or the other way around?? (Score:1)
New Tool Tracks (Score:1)
Re:New Tool Tracks (Score:1)
Hey, good thought! I've been wondering when this comes out. I see the date is May now!
Re:New Tool Tracks (Score:1)
1. Vicarious
2. Jambi
3. Wings For Marie (Pt 1)
4. 10,000 Days (Wings Pt 2)
5. The Pot
6. Lipan Conjuring
7. Lost Keys (Blame Hofmann)
8. Rosetta Stoned
9. Intension