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.

The story does get a little murky though once you take a look at eBizMBA’s methodology. The research company took a whole bunch of freely available data and somehow mashed it together to rank video, Torrent and porn sites. The winner obviously is - wait - Metacafe?

From the website:

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.”

Playboy bigger than Pirate Bay?

Riiiight. eBizMBA also ranks Playboy.com higher than The Pirate Bay, but slightly below Mininova. Of course one could argue that most Torrent sites have enough porn to make the distrinction between adult and video / Torrents obsolete.

And is it just me or does anyone else have a the weird feeling that those porn sites are picked very much at random? I for one have never even heard of Worldsex.com. But eBizMBA thinks they are more popular than The Pirate Bay.

Alexa tells us a different story:

Written by Janko Roettgers, a technology journalist. Catch his views on the business, technology and culture of P2P at P2P Blog. This post is licensed under the Creative Commons.

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