Piracy Studies As a Spam Tool
Over the last years we’ve seen dozens of piracy surveys. Thousands of news outlets and blogs generally cover the results, which turned the subject into a cheap and effective way of spamming unrelated services.
This week, another insignificant survey was published, claiming that 82% of all Brits download illegally. However, what really caught our eye in the reports was the following.
“Mark Pearson, managing director of the MyVoucherCodes.co.uk website that commissioned the survey said [blabla]“
Really? Why would a coupon site commission a study on piracy?
The answer is not that hard. In only costs a few hundred bucks to do the survey and there could be hundreds of sites that pick it up, generating a lot of Google link juice. It’s a cheap method to get a spammy service advertised on high profile sites and it certainly beats the cost of real advertising.
Sad but true.
Pretty clever really.
And you just gave them more juice.
I didn’t link :)
Well, another reason to disregard such studies. One cannot take any conclusions out of a study before knowing exactly how it was conducted and what premises had to be adopted.
But worse than a coupon site funding a piracy study is someone actually publishing with intentions other than ridiculing the author and the media industry…
If “studies” like this are so cheep to turn out, why do people not band together and commission one saying file sharing helps industry.
It’s cheap to commission the study, not the results. If it’s really a “study,” not just propaganda, you can’t guarantee the results. You could commission a study with questions that explore if file sharing helps the industry, but it would have to be obviously true for the study to reflect that.
Second paragraph, last line: cough out > caught our. ;)
Getting into search engines is easy, its all Search Engine Optimization(SEO) and getting as many pages to link to your site as possible.
Its all in the META people.
It’s a dirty business… good for them… sellouts….
In a study undertaken by the Milk Marketing Board
9 out of 10 babies enjoyed being breast fed
You can “create” statistics to “prove” anything. Depends on which groups you ask.
If you ask a bunch of pre-schoolers “Is it OK to share music and pictures with friends?” (at an age when their parents are trying to teach them “It’s nice to share”) you will get a very high “Yes” ratio.
If you ask a group of retirees “Is it OK to steal copyrighted material using computers and the internet?” Your survey says something completely different.
99.99% of all surveys PROVE this! :)