Bittorrent, ratings and views

We missed a few of the Rent-a-Goalie episodes, prompting a visit to TorrentSpy and BitTorrent. RAG only has a maximum of TWO (2) leechers for each episode and no seeders. I was stunned by how unpopular that is. You can't even download the last episode of the season as there are no torrents availabe for episode 8. I've downloaded Lost episodes that had 20K seeders.

It got me wondering about seeders/leechers as a measure of popularity of shows. Now some shows like Lost you can get online, so that will throw the #s off. I'm not sure how many downloads/views there are, and what the transfer is between them. I tried to watch the tail end of a Lost episode a couple weeks ago online, and it was terrible. P2P is still better but maybe not for long.

Here's a quick survey of the seeders of the most recent episodes:
Lost: 10 000
Galactica: 15 000
Desperate Housewives: 2000
Rent-a-goalie: 0
Corner Gas: 38
24: 3000

I remember the numbers for Lost and 24 being much higher than that. It's clear that the streaming viewing is taking a lot of traffic away from BitTorrent. That must make the advertisers happy. Alternatively, the shows are hurting a bit. I think it's great to see Galactica doing so well. As an aside on Galactic, how about an episode with actual combat with the Cylons rather than humanity's battle against itself?

I wonder about the viewership claims. My attempt at watching Lost involved about 6 different sign-ons. Did ABC count that as 6 views? Who's verifying the number of views, if anybody?

I don't think it's safe interpret the torrent numbers as being a measure of relative popularity. Galactica has geek factor and no site downloads that gives it a considerable boost compared to the more mainstream shows with downloads.

I think that the change in # of downloads indicates relative popularity for a given show. When I started downloading galactica from episode 1, # of seeders was in the low thousands. In season 2, it was usually in the mid to high thousands. Now it's in the mid-teen thousands. That says to me that it's getting quite popular. The highest I ever saw for Lost was about 25 000 seeders. That was during season 2 and the height of it's popularity and just before it was available on streaming.

The netnet: torrent changes can show a relative change and gross level of popularity. The absolute numbers can't be compared, as I'm pretty sure that 24 isn't 1/4 the popularity of housewives or 1/5 the popularity of galactica.