Torrents vs. other

[Quarkboy]

I'd like to ask the cumulative knowledge here to help me debate a question I'm thinking about.

In today's environment, what is the ratio of people who download torrents to the total number of people that watch a show either through streaming or alternative methods of downloading like direct downloading.

I.e. say a torrent gets 2000 downloads. Is it safe to assume that 4,000 people ended up watching and/or downloading the show? 6,000? more like 20,000?

Frankly I'm under the impression at the moment that the ratio could be as high as 1 to 10 or even higher.
What are other people's opinions about the current state of things?
Obviously it will vary considerably by genre...

[MeoTwister5]

I'm curious to see what the the researched values are. On personal anecdote, most people I know IRL would rather torrent shows than watch streaming due to convenience, better video qualities and easier accessibility to "rarer" shows. In the age of high speed internet sometimes the time difference between streams and torrents are small enough to not be a bother,

[cyberbeing]

If considering direct downloads alone, over the course of 7 days, I doubt they ever exceed 50% of total torrent downloads in North America. Streamers probably max out at around 200% of total torrent downloads in North America over the course of 7 days. So if a public torrent got 2000 downloads in 7 days (aka an unpopular show), you are probably looking at 1000 direct downloaders, and 4000 unofficial streamers best-case. Worst-case would be more like 2000 public torrent, 500 direct download, and 1500 unofficial streamers.

Free Streaming: Limited locations. Unofficial streams get deleted quickly on mainstream sites.
Free File Hosters: Many available, but only around 10 are suitable/popular. Files eventually get DCMA take-down requests by rights holders.
Free Anime Direct Download (excluding public file hosters): Very few exist. Even fewer are aware they exist.
IRC: Doubtful that the number of people who use IRC to download has increased in the past 5 years.
Usenet (Newsgroups): Users may have increased slightly, but free newsgroup access in the USA has certainly dwindled.

The biggest change for direct download availability, has been free file hosters. The biggest change for streaming availability, has been official streams.

Am I overlooking some massive cache of public streaming and ddl sites? I'm admittedly pulling streaming stats out of thin air (I'm not of the streaming generation), but as for ddl, you are usually looking at an average of 50-500 downloads per mirror (with a median value of ~250), over the course of a week. Just assume popular shows to have more mirrors and downloads per mirror.

[Daiz]

What makes this question pretty hard to answer is that the only things we get public information about is first-hand torrent downloads (the torrents posted by fansubbers themselves) and XDCC downloads on single bots. I'd really like to see some viewcounts on stuff on CR, especially to see how they compare to HorribleSubs / CrunchySubs downloads and to the "not-a-direct-rip"/fansub releases.

Also, at least in my case, fansubber-provided DDLs don't seem to be that popular - for about 10000 finished torrent downloads, there's about 300-400 DDLs. The overall DDL count is obviously higher due to all the second-hand sources, but it's impossible to keep track of them.

[cyth]

It will not only vary by genre of release, but also which group released it when. Some torrents will get 2:1, some 10:1, some 20:1,...

[bayoab]

Originally Posted by cyberbeing

Am I overlooking some massive cache of public streaming and ddl sites? I'm admittedly pulling streaming stats out of thin air (I'm not of the streaming generation),

I think you are underestimating how big illegal streaming is (or sites are) by many fold. Clearly, this depends on the show but just based on hunting down afk stuff on youtube, it was always 3-5x or higher than the download values. Also, considering how many large(?) re-streaming sites there are, there has to be an audience for it.

Originally Posted by Daiz

I'd really like to see some viewcounts on stuff on CR, especially to see how they compare to HorribleSubs / CrunchySubs downloads and to the "not-a-direct-rip"/fansub releases.

We can actually get estimated view counts off anything using Funi's player and relative counts off youtube and compare those to the equivalent rips. This does miss the hulu ones and the player isn't accurate, but it still gives a generic scale.

Such as:
Fractale ep 3 official youtube ~5k, player ~35k
Torrents ~36k (I ignored the raws here.)

[cyberbeing]

Originally Posted by bayoab

I think you are underestimating how big illegal streaming is (or sites are) by many fold. Clearly, this depends on the show but just based on hunting down afk stuff on youtube, it was always 3-5x or higher than the download values. Also, considering how many large(?) re-streaming sites there are, there has to be an audience for it.

Very possible, since other than knowing it's been a problem, I'm not very familiar with where people go for illegal streaming in the past 4 years (which I would consider fansub streaming, rather than embedding official streams in other sites without permission). I've only noticed a trend with DCMA take-downs on Youtube happening very quickly, in recent years.

Yet the 'afk stuff on youtube' as you put it, was why I was trying to come up with stats for the first 7 days after being subbed for North America only. Streaming counts seem to balloon if they remain on big streaming sites long enough, but I doubt most of that happens in the first 7 days. As for the 3-5x figure, maybe if you added up all the global illegal stream views for a particular episode over the course of a year... Streaming counts are hard to generalize broadly across all shows, as cyth pointed out.

Originally Posted by cyberbeing

Am I overlooking some massive cache of public streaming and ddl sites?

Almost forgot Usenet (Newsgroups). It's possible that may have seen a minor increase in recent years, but at least in the USA, most ISPs have cut off their free Newsgroup access.

[Vexx]

All I can add is anecdotal experience. Probably 4-6 people besides myself see the files I collect. I never torrent anymore, 2 reasons:
1) my land-wireless ISP requests we don't - mom'n'pop operation, most users are too moronic to understand how to throttle/manage a torrent so they just have a blanket policy.
2) The public nature of torrents make it an easy target for legal "fishing". Until "Crypto-cloud" protocols are implemented its really not a Good Idea at the moment.

I pretty much stick to DDL via IRC or http/ftp.

[cyberbeing]

For many years now, DDL has really been the way to go for people with good connectivity, but the anime torrenting masses don't appear to have made that revelation in any significant numbers.

[cyth]

Originally Posted by cyberbeing

For many years now, DDL has really been the way to go for people with good connectivity, but the anime torrenting masses don't appear to have made that revelation in any significant numbers.

It's not convenient to visit numerous DDL sites to get everything you want, or spend finding another site when one gets reported and shuts down. Also, they are not as fast, they tend to have many ads and constant nagging for donations, basically they are a pain. I tried using a friend's DDL aggregator for some time that was pretty fast at fetching everything that was torrented on major sites, but first there was the issue of data retention, and second it didn't have the RSS option (which many people exploit to auto-download files). I spend 10-15 minutes per season setting up RSS torrent filters so I don't have to worry about trivial stuff such as visiting different websites to get anime. It only takes one good aggregator that indexes hash data.

[cyberbeing]

Originally Posted by cyth

It's not convenient to visit numerous DDL sites to get everything you want, or spend finding another site when one gets reported and shuts down. Also, they are not as fast, they tend to have many ads and constant nagging for donations, basically they are a pain.

I'll present the counter-argument based on my personal experience over the past few years.

You don't need to visit numerous DDL sources (though many sources are available), the smart ones don't shut down, they can max out my 25Mbit connection, you can use an ad blocker (but good DDL sites don't even use ads), and they are faster and more convenient than torrents. Though I will agree that cyth's view probably matches what the majority of torrent downloads think about DDL sources. That naivety ends up being a good thing, since it just means more bandwidth for the minority who know how to find and efficiently use good DDL sources. People who torrent are happy, people who DDL are happy, and it all balances out.

Back on topic. If illegal streaming is an elephant, direct download is a mouse by comparison.

[Quarkboy]

Well, to ask an addition question:

Is the number of torrent downloads even a reasonable predictor for total western viewership for new anime?

By viewership, I mean total number of people who watch the show by any means.

So does a show that gets torrented 4000 times in a week ACTUALLY 2 times more popular than one that gets 2000? Does it vary so much per show and torrent download numbers a small enough percentage that they aren't a reliable predictor at all?

[jfs]

I really think viewership demographics affects the ratio of download numbers to (illegal) streaming view counts.
My experience is that the current 15-18 year olds are much more likely to be looking for their anime on streaming sites, while older viewers are more likely to download, so if anything you should construct some function of viewership age to downloaders/streamers ratio. That would then also depend on knowing who is actually watching the series.

In contrast, the ratio of torrent downloads to direct downloads (HTTP, XDCC, FTP) probably depends more on the release group and how they advertise themselves and their releases.

[j0x]

well i have read something about this, so this might help as its statistics, here it is

Despite all the hoopla over illegal BitTorrent sites, that's not where the majority of piracy activity is taking place. In fact, despite huge efforts to curb it, the availability of direct downloads continues to fuel the most online piracy.

source: http://www.tgdaily.com/networking-br...or-bittorrents

ill add that i personally agree with that report, because their are countless warez sites and blogs and anime sites that provide direct downloads on filehosting sites like megaupload, fileserve, hotfile to name a few, and for example i know a warez site that has like 3 million members and i happen to know that this uploaders can get as many as 3000-4000 in average downloads for each episode link they provide

to be honest im one of those people who like to download on filehosting sites as jdownloader is easy, and a lot of people that can afford go buy a premium account to this filehosting sites and lets not forget about premium link generators

and lets face it people are in the impression that direct downloading is more safer than torrents in the watchful eyes of the law enforcers, so i guess those uploaders on file hosting sites just use a VPS (turn seedbox) to download from torrents then later upload them to filehost sites and viola you got gazillion piracy over the net

[cyberbeing]

When you consider most episodes have anywhere from 10-100k downloads across all torrents, 3k-4k DDL per episode from a massive warez site is a drop in the bucket.

For example using the stats which bayoab posted for Fractale:

40K Official Stream
36k Torrent Downloads
20K DDL (estimated)

Estimated DDL (breakdown):
4K Massive Warez Site #1
4K Massive Warez Site #1
2K Moderate Anime Site #1
2K Moderate Anime Site #2
1K Small Anime Site #1
1K Small Anime Site #2
1K Small Anime Site #3
1K Small Anime Site #4
1K Small Anime Site #5
1K IRC
1K Usenet
1K Other

You can see how hard it would be to get DDL numbers to even match Torrent downloaders. People who are too lazy to torrent anime are usually those who prefer streaming. They have no desire to have a copy on their hard drive.

[j0x]

Originally Posted by cyberbeing

When you consider most episodes have anywhere from 10-100k downloads across all torrents, 3k-4k DDL per episode from a massive warez site is a drop in the bucket.

of course your comparing 100k downloads from all torrents compared to 4k download from a single warez site

their are lot of warez site and anime site that offers direct download, i say direct download sites are more in numbers compared to anime torrent sites for example

and do not forget about re-encoders to small file size or transrating encoders they are starting to be popular too as streaming sites, plus they use direct download service of filehosting sites like megaupload too

[cyberbeing]

Well in my example I was comparing 36K public torrent downloads to a very generous estimate of 20K direct downloads over 12 sites, but that is beside the point.


For the sake of argument, I took a quick look at a two massive warez sites with anime sections (one had 2 million and the other 3 million members).

Shows like Fractale? An average of 500 (2mil site) & 600 (3mil site) downloads per episode, over 6 episodes.

Bleach Episode 310? Around 1000 (2mil site) & 5000 (3mil site) downloads. That episode looks to have had an excess of 130,000 public torrent downloads. You realize how many DDL sites it would take to match the public torrent numbers, don't you? Most would be nowhere near that large either.

(numbers calculated based on the assumption that 80% of people that view a thread, actually download the episode)


ckmox, I think you are really overestimating the popularity of anime to western audiences.

[j0x]

nah im pertaining to all of the world not just western audiences, especially asian countries like china and india that have massive population and piracy issues because of low economy

and i consider your points and observation too

[cyberbeing]

If you were considering middle-eastern and asian countries in your previous post, then it makes more sense. It goes beyond the scope of Quarkboy's question though.

Quarkboy is paid to professionally translate anime into English for sites like Crunchyroll and others who are targeting a western audience. He appears to be trying to define a metric to gauge show popularity, and I can only assume pitch particular works to be translated into English or ignored. If a company is paying to have something translated, they want to know that enough people will watch it to generate a profitable return on investment.

[j0x]

well if your just considering the western market because its the part of the world that can mostly pay then ye i agree that streaming sites are better than torrents for them, and i think CrunchyRoll is starting to be popular and popularity means profitable in simple thinking

Spoiler for but kinda offtopic and wishful thinking:

but kinda offtopic and wishful thinking, if only anime studios can promote their anime like what fansubs does in which they can provide free watch of their anime then its good, the anime studios will just make sure that its in low quality too but still watchable like 360p at 40-60mb filesize for a 24 minute show, i said torrents because its kinda like low cost to zero cost for them to promote their anime and 360p is like the standard streaming quality that is just bearable to watch and just good for promotional purposes so watching the 360p releases will then urge the fans to buy the DVD/BD disc that is in glorious true HQ/HD, and while at it i say make their BD and DVD all have english subs too and make them available for online purchase because im inclined to think that westerners like buying more original products (that means buying straight from japan) so that maybe another reason why they hate english dub