On BitTorrent, TV Beats Porn...What?

Joseph Laszlo | May 18, 2007, 12:34 PM

Torrentfreak's posted some interesting charts based on SUMOTorrent data looking at what people are sharing and downloading via BitTorrent.

The gist of their finding is that in terms of what's being downloaded, TV is by far the dominant content category, downloaded by almost 50% of people using BT at any time. General video, then games, then music come next, and only after that is adult, with a mere 6% of downloads.

Is anyone else somewhat surprised by this? (Judging from the Broadband Reports comments, the answer is "yes.")

In terms of what's available via BT, it's mostly music and videos, TV is around fourth, and again, adult is pretty small.

I buy that TV is a big part of overall BT traffic. I know lots of people who use BT once in a while when they miss an episode of a show, if it's not available from iTunes or via next-day streaming from the relevant TV network.

As for the small share attributable to adult, well, maybe basing the analysis on sumotorrent may not be an accurate view of the entire universe of torrents. If large parts of the adult traffic centers on specialist websites, that would skew the dataset TorrentFreak had to work with.