Bittorrent 7.2 logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In 2008, in his bestselling book The Pirate's Dilemma, Matt Mason argued that the tech-savvy, remix mindset was (and eventually would) dominating popular culture. The people in these communities weren't thieving pirates, he felt; they were digital entrepreneurs who would remake our media institutions in their image, and everything from sneakers to music would feel their impact.
With studies now showing the piracy not only doesn't hurt box office or album sales but actually boosts them, and people like Sean Parker became billionaires, Mason's prophecy has mostly come true. And fittingly, Mason himself now holds a position that couldn't have existed too long ago. He's the executive director of marketing for BitTorrent, a company that now has more than 160 million users and raised more than $40 million in funding. The BitTorrent protocol is used by companies as diverse as Wikipedia, Twitter and Facebook.
The technology was once almost exclusively used by consumers to share copyrighted materials. But BitTorrent Inc. (the company that owns the protocol) never endorsed piracy and is now becoming the new best friend of the record labels, studios and game developers with its moves to put legitimate content in front of consumers and by adding ways to monetize that content. So I asked Matt about the monetizing content distribution and the future of peer-to-peer content. His answer is worth reposting in full, because it shows what he and other such advocates have always believed: file sharing was driven underground because of bad laws, poor understanding and greedy companies. Today, now that culture is catching up, the technology is being put to good use—just as the pirates had always advocated it could be. In his own words:
"For the last 18 months or so at BitTorrent we've been working with a hand-picked selection of artists, filmmakers, TV producers, DJs, game developers and authors to put their work in front of our users to see if we could generate positive returns. Overall, the results have been staggering. For years academic institutions and even industry organizations like the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) have been publishing studies showing that file-sharers spend more money on content and engage with it at a deeper level. After nearly two years of experiments with content, we now know that to be true.
"We helped Pioneer One, a TV show pilot, reach enough people and generate enough money in donations that the producers were able to fund the entire first season of the show. We distributed a bundle of music for Pretty Lights, a DJ from Colorado, last December. That bundle was downloaded over 6 million times and generated 100,000 new opt-in email sign-ups on Pretty Lights' website. That's 100,000 real fans he can engage with and earn income from for the rest of his career. Last month we released a BitTorrent Bundle of new music from Counting Crows, who had asked us to help generate word of mouth to promote their new album. Before working with BitTorrent, they were being mentioned in social media channels once every eight minutes. After we launched the BitTorrent Bundle, they were being mentioned once every two minutes.
"The point of all this is to examine the new business models content creators can build using the BitTorrent ecosystem, and use the results of these experiments to create the tools creators will need to do this better. The internet’s potential as a place where content can thrive has not been delivered on yet. Creators are struggling to release media online in ways that make sense. It's still hard to build a direct connection to a fan base. We make more giant media files than ever before but it's still hard to share large files over the Internet using anything other than the BitTorrent protocol. It's still hard to find the content you want in the format you want it in, and it's hard for artists to deliver that to their fans. It's still hard to monetize content in meaningful ways and keep all your data. We hope to change that by using the insights gleaned from these experiments to create the ecosystem creators deserve.
"Peer-accelerated technology is an idea that's time has come. The BitTorrent protocol has always been the fastest way to move large files. The technology currently moves between 20% and 40% of global web traffic every day, and among other things BitTorrent Inc. is busy working on new ways to monetize content distribution, new uses for peer-accelerated technology and a new live-streaming protocol that has the potential to be as world-changing as the original BitTorrent technology."
I'll leave you with one more thought from Mason that he gave to Forbes earlier this year. I think it expresses the "pirate's dilemma" quite well.
“We owe it to the world to give people options, not rules,” says Mason. “It’s really up to artists and fans to figure out the ways that this is going to work.”
Ryan Holiday is the author of Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (Penguin/Portfolio). More of his writing can be found at RyanHoliday.net and you can sign up for monthly reading recommendations through his reading list email.
