The Death Of File Sharing Is Greatly Exaggerated

from the i-think-i'll-go-for-a-walk dept

Wed, Oct 21st 2009 5:49pm — Mike Masnick

There have been a few reports lately claiming that file sharing is decreasing. Often, the "explanation" is that more people are switching to streaming services. But that doesn't seem to make much sense, given that the streaming services are still greatly limited and have their own share of problems. And, indeed, it looks like at least some of these reports are being misinterpreted. The most recent story that got a bunch of headlines claiming that P2P was "dying"? Turns out that it's all relative. What the report actually said was that P2P file sharing is growing less fast. So it has a smaller overall marketshare -- but in terms of absolute numbers? It's still growing. However, given the size of the "market," that's not too surprising. It's pretty saturated.

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Filed Under: file sharing

12 Comments

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ChurchHatesTucker (profile), 21 Oct 2009 @ 5:58pm

Yeah... about that
How are they measuring? Port traffic? Heh.

What I mean to say is, they're totally right. P2P is dead. Move along, nothing to see here.
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- TattoozNTech (profile), 21 Oct 2009 @ 6:10pm
  
  Re: Yeah... about that
  HAHAHAH! funny comment FTW! nice one dude! lol
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Anonymous Coward, 21 Oct 2009 @ 6:16pm

uh... i'm NOT downloading songs while NOT listening to some streaming service
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thublihnk (profile), 21 Oct 2009 @ 6:38pm

That might have something to do with the fact that a whole litany of .torrent trackers are going down/being neutered recently.
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- TheStupidOne, 22 Oct 2009 @ 8:02am
  
  Re:
  maybe they were only looking at those sites, and now since they are gone they said it is dead. However everyone just moved on to something new. I personally use google.
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Anonymous Coward, 21 Oct 2009 @ 6:59pm

The article says that this is a measure of all traffic, not just the various means by which creative content is acquired/used. All that really means is that there's more stuff to do with the Internet. Also, people can (and do!) use more than one protocol at a time. Also, there are more uses of peer-to-peer connections than just creative content transfers. Really, I'm not sure where the conclusion that any particular use of the Internet is declining comes from. But maybe people who can't tell the difference between losing money and simply not making it will draw the same conclusion and back off a little.
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Anonymous Coward, 21 Oct 2009 @ 8:25pm

Or more people are finding ways to hide their use of P2P.
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Anonymous Coward, 21 Oct 2009 @ 9:43pm

So I read the story, looked at the numbers that NY times shows:

P2P was 40% of traffic 2 years ago. Now it is 18% of traffic.

Internet traffic has increased 35% per year for 2 years.

So, if 2 years ago was 100 (traffic number), today that number is 182.25 (35% increase each of 2 years).

40% of 100 = 40. 18% of 182.25 = 32.805. In real terms (actual traffic) is down almost 20%.

Someone want to check my numbers?
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AJ, 22 Oct 2009 @ 4:12am

Hide and Seek
Perhaps they are using private networks, making it harder to track?
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www.eZee.se (profile), 22 Oct 2009 @ 6:17am

No! No! Its true, p2p is dying....
now, why do we need those anti piracy scumbags?

Good job anti piracy people, heres a pat on the back... now f*ck off and die.
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chris (profile), 22 Oct 2009 @ 9:40am

understandable
i moved to a new house and i haven't finished cabling it, so my servers have been offline for a couple of weeks.

hopefully i can get all my gear lit up in a week or two and those file sharing numbers will be back to normal.
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cmac, 22 Oct 2009 @ 12:00pm

pirac
I haven't pirated anything since I started using netflix on demand and hulu.
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