Jun 09
9
The Hedonic Value of P2P to our Economy.
The other day I blogged about the fact that P2P was
big business.
We discussed the value of the infrastructure purchased as a
result of P2P activity, both at the carrier and consumer level.
Today we will be anecdotally commencing an examination of
the apparently growing causational relationship between higher education and
file sharing (and no, I’m not referring to the fact that universities/colleges
are a hot bed of invisible i2p
file sharers).
If the content industry is to be believed, their business
model has been devastated by young college students wanting to get their
entertainment for free.
Therefore we can make some assumptions from this claim.
1.
File sharing exists to rip off the Music
Industry,
2.
Ergo, the most popular files will no doubt be
the Music Industries most cherished jewels. The Top 40, an artificially
developed promotional aid to assist in the sales of music tracks and
development of artists
Enabling some conclusions to be drawn, amongst which would appear
to be the fact that:
3.
If the most popular files on the file sharing
networks are not the Jewels of the Music Industry, then they have been
misrepresenting the facts and their pleas for legislative protection and
judicial relief need to be ignored and current legislative enactments need to
be reviewed and rescinded if appropriate; e.g.: The three Strikes.
On that basis we started looking at the most likely
downloaded music content, the Australian Top 50 published by ARIA.
As with any charting system, there are risers and fallers.
The current Aria Top 50 Number #1 song is Boom Boom Pow by Black Eyed Peas. It
would appear to be (as far as the P2P community concerned), a faller. Whereas,
current number 21, You Belong With Me from Taylor
Swift would appear to be a riser.
Our method for determining the popularity of the Australian
Top 50 includes a factor based on the number of requests for a particular track
by a certain artist from Australian IP numbers on the ED2K network.
We have devised a methodology for eliminating the thousands
of industry generated fake and empty files from our data (inserted by the music
industry to make obtaining the content harder for illegal file sharers and also
a lot harder for anyone to measure the real metrics of file sharing.)
And we have some stats… according to an auto port (PC
service ports) poll
of 1.6 million users conducted in 2007 that demonstrated that 0.04% of the
world uses emule on the eDonket network. And the number of Emule users are estimated
at between 3 (Peerates) and 27 (IPFI) million.
For conservative purposes, we prefer to use the Peerates number, 3 million.
The number of connected users per peer vary between 0 to
several hundred – lets say average connected hosts per peer = a conservative 100.
Each host can effectively manage an average of about 31 file
requests per hour. (This number is relevant to several factors, including the
number of files a user shares on his/her harddisk, the distance between peers
(number of hops) and the
popularity of the individual files.)
So – number of Emule file requests (not actual downloads) to peers that have advertised the availability
of a non-fake version of the file available for downloading.
Therefore, Global Emule Users times Connected Peers times
Connected hours times Requests per Hour times percentage of peers within less
than 4 hops distance.
GU * CP
*DH * HR *PH
= 3,000,000 * 100 *24 * 31 *78%
Total 174,096,000,000 file requests per 24
hours.
If that represents 0.04% of the worlds file sharing base (as
per the 1.6 million sample taken) then we have a pretty definitive quantum.
Unfortunately very few people are examining the Hedonic
value to the economy of the users downloading software programs, ebooks and
entertainment.
P2P networks according to our research are downloading an
awful lot of educational material right along with the entertainment portion.
For example users downloading educational material like
Microsoft Office Excel – Hungry Minds – Excel Programming (2002).pdf by a
factor of .4 requests per hour more than the number one listed hit song in Australia.
These numbers would suggest that P2P users are more
interested in educating themselves than entertaining themselves.
If our statistical analysis continues to confirm this proof
it would appear that as well as P2P
killing the Porn Star, it’s users are now more interested in bettering
themselves educationally than ensuring the availability of the latest rap aural
transgression assault on their eardrums.
To refresh your memories, in that article we said:
“According to Ipoque, 22% of Internet users generate 76% of
all internet traffic via Bit Torrent or emule downloading 38% movies, 25%
Games 14% TV shows 9% music and only 1% porn”.
The music statistic was made up of 7.12% audio only files
and 2.52% of music videos.
However the conclusion was that Pornography appeared to be
gradually displaced by other areas of interest by consumers, the majority of
whom appeared to satisfy their curiosity within a few months and move onto more
relevant and interesting content.
The quantum of value per downloaded educational item of
content is subjective to the individual.
Nevertheless, the mere fact that users are electing
educational materials in higher frequency growth patterns than entertainment
material (note the exponential curve), is significant and we feel it therefore
relevant to conclude anecdotally that this would appear to be a trend.
We haven’t quite worked out how to determine the age of the
persons requesting Autocad or Crystal Reports or the entire Hungry Mind series.
However, if as I believe, the ages of the requesters of those files is getting
younger, then some additional conclusions can be drawn:
1.
Reclassification of Material as Educational
Promotional Give away marketing.
2.
IFS via P2P is filling a gap not currently
provided by Universities or High Schools
3.
A better educated population resulting in a
higher GDP and higher lifestyle aspirations
4.
As a 13 year old can have absolutely no use for
Autocad apart from the educational value, the “loss” suffered by Software
companies and as reported by IDC (summary findings here) needs to be
revisited and revised downwards – however, those companies should be able to
claim the downloads as a promotional cost on their taxation returns..
The Hedonic value? Considerable. The methodology for calculating that value
and adding it to the national GDP of Australia ? We’re working on it.
But some initial subject matter worthy in our opinion of
further consideration and research would be:
- Socio-economic
values including: - Value
to trade of international language assimilation through the distribution
of popular multi-media content. - Sociological
value of distribution of country specific cultural content - Global
Trust quotient developing as a result of 1 & 2.
The
value to commerce of having technologically more capable employees
familiar and capable of utilizing a wider range of software environments.The
value to Government of having a higher level of education fostered by open
access to information.
Back To the Music
Let us not forget that the whole file sharing hoo haa was
started by Napster and it was the music industry that decided to latch onto
file sharing as the reason for its failing revenues.
We think it would be ironic if the device (The Top 40 List)
that “made” the music industry successful during their build-up years was the
unraveling of their aspirations a half century later. Not because there is
anything wrong with the Top 40, with the exception being, the Industries Top 40
does not apparently equal the users Top 40.
Just a small thing.
Ueber alles? (“more than anything else”) We think, no
longer applies to the music industry in respect to P2P file sharing. But of
course this an anecdotal opinion based on only a few months research.
In Conclusion
In our article last week we posited that the values
calculated for the national communications and personal infrastructure
requirements were based on the driving force of P2P as being the catalyst for
continued demand and subsequent growth.
If the additional value of the Hedonic benefits of P2P
networking are added to the equation,
Vis:
1.
Easy to obtain multi-media content (i.e.:
Grandma can do it)
2.
No limits on access to Data, both Governmental
and Academic
3.
Less resources utilized on international
bandwidth segments due to localized file sharing networks – thereby increasing
the user experience for other non p2p file sharing users
4.
Rapid referencing of materials not readily
available elsewhere.
Then the value per person [PP] in Australia
on a national basis increases from $1,300 PP to an estimated $4,200 PP, man
woman and child.
That is now 10% of the GDP.
P2P appears to be providing unexpected benefits.
However I should make it clear that these numbers are based
on anecdotal estimates and require additional research.
References:
A Measurement Study of Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Systems
Stefan Saroiu, P. Krishna Gummadi, Steven D. Gribble
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Univ.
of Washington, Seattle,
WA, 98195-2350
A Survey of Anonymous Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing
Tom Chothia and Konstantinos Chatzikokolakis
Laboratoire d’Informatique, ´Ecole Polytechnique, 91128 Palaiseau
Cedex, France
{tomc,kostas}@lix.polytechnique.fr
OECD INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY OUTLOOK 2004
PEER TO PEER NETWORKS IN OECD COUNTRIES
Ethical Issues in the Music Industry
Response to Innovation and Piracy Robert F. Easley
Journal of Business Ethics (2005) 62: 163–168
Content Availability, Pollution and Poisoning in File
Sharing Peer toPeer Networks
Nicolas Christin Andreas S. Weigend John Chuang
S.I.M.S., UC Berkeley
Development of peer-to-peer (P2P) internet online hybrid
test system
Peng Pan1; Hiroshi Tomofuji; Tao Wang, Masayoshi Nakashima Makoto
Ohsaki1; and Khalid M. Mosalam;
GEEKS BEARING GIFTS OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE AND ITS ENEMIES
Nicholas Gruen
POLICY • Vol. 21 No. 2 • Winter 2005
Privacy & Piracy: The Paradox of Illegal File Sharing on
Peer-to-Peer Networks and the Impact
of Technology on the Entertainment Industry” [2003]
Written Statement of Professor Doris Estelle Long Senate
Committee on Governmental Affairs
THE BITTORRENT P2P FILE-SHARING SYSTEM: MEASUREMENTS AND
ANALYSIS
J.A. Pouwelse, P. Garbacki, D.H.J. Epema, H.J. Sips
Department of Computer Science, Delft
University of Technology,
the Netherlands
Listed Alphabetically and displaying the ARIA Top 50 position numbers but showing the request popularity.
We request your patience whilst we're working on devising a methodology to clearly display the results.