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Comment by tacLog | Hacker News Reader

I found this site from the torrentfreak link below and thought it was pretty cool.

https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/stat/annual/2021 If you flip thru the years at least the top movies in 2018 have more downloads than the top movies in 2021. I think that can somewhat safely answer your questions.

EDIT: WRONG because as a comment points out below older movies also might just have been downloaded more over time.

From this site, it doesn't look like their was much of an uptick in top downloaded movies from 2019 to 2020. And in general torrenting has been growing less popular.

However, the numbers on this site in general don't sanity check very well for me. For example, the End Game Avengers movie, which was incredibly popular, was only downloaded: 2,890 times in 2019? That doesn't seem high enough to me.

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It does make some sense that movies which have been available for three years could have more downloads than movies which have been available for one year.

I didn't think of this at all. This throws the tenuous conclusions I was drawing completely out the window.

A friend who torrents these things just checked for me and saw well over a 100,000 'snatches' for that Avengers flick on just one private torrent tracker.

So yeah, not 2,890. Think millions.

Additionally, I guess there are also many people, myself included, who download stuff again, but I don't use torrents, as I have indeed been burned in the past by that. I now use forums that link to encrypted Mega accounts or similar.

> A friend who torrents these things just checked for me and saw well over a 100,000 'snatches' for that Avengers flick on just one private torrent tracker.

This makes far more sense, I wonder why their numbers are so bad.

The stats can be collected only from public torrents where DHT is being used (AFAIK). There are many private trackers that are closed to the outside world and have tens of thousands of members, each of whom may not only download from the peers within that private tracker, but also share the downloaded content with others.

Yeah but if most people have services - I have three - then the most popular movies for that year will be on all the services almost. Endgame has been on all my services at some point over the last couple years. I've seen it probably 20+ times. Probably also the people who are most likely to want to watch Endgame have services.

By services you mean, Netflix, Hulu and similar right? Not plex, or the various illegal streaming sites?

right.

I don't torrent when I pirate anymore (or use usenet). Torrent stats might be going down because there are easier alternatives.

Do you mean the common streaming sites that are all over the place now? Or some other better method?

Easier alternatives such as?

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