Market Research can be used to prove pretty much anything, and this case a company called eBizMBA has used it to show that both online video sites and porn sites such as Playboy.com are bigger than Torrent websites.
This may well prove to be true if you factor in recent measurements showing web based video resources such as YouTube has now overtaken P2P traffic.
Don’t Trust the Stats
Unfortunately you can’t always trust everything you read on the internet. eBizMBA had simply mashed together a whole bunch of freely available statistics to rank video, torrent and porn sites.
My studies of statistical analysis tells me that you can’t just throw numbers from different studies together and hope for the best. Each study has a different methodolgy meaning the numbers cannot be compared as they haven’t been exposed to the same controls.
That didn’t stop eBizMBA from drawing some strange conclusions however:
Which is more popular on the internet, Porn, File Sharing, or Video sites? We wanted to know so we chose to take a look at traffic data from the top 5 sites in their respective categories to determine the victor. (…) To insure a fair fight we decided to remove YouTube from the fray because of the obvious traffic advantage they get from being a part of Google Inc.”
What sound methodology! Just throw out the leading video site because it is owned by Google. Take a look at YouTube’s traffic history and you’ll see YouTube was still leading the pack way before the aquisition by Google.
Playboy bigger than Pirate Bay?
Using a small sample of porn sites eBizMBA also seemed to conclude that porn is bigger than torrents.
While it doesn’t really take a genious to work that out it is worthwhile noting that torrent websites are often used for finding free porn anyway, so there is no black and white distinction between the two.
eBizMBA also ranks Playboy.com higher than The Pirate Bay, but slightly below Mininova.
Alexa tells us a different story:
Just goes to show how misleading some "studies" can be.
[Via P2P-Blog]
