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I've always wondered if there was a way to monetize uTorrent. The userbase is predominantly people who don't want to pay for digital goods. So they're not goi

by keslag 12y ago

I've always wondered if there was a way to monetize uTorrent. The userbase is predominantly people who don't want to pay for digital goods. So they're not going to pay for your software, and it's a pretty hard space to sell to advertisers. You're essentially left with companies whose reputation is so bad, that being associated with illegal downloads doesn't negatively affect their brand.

harperlee 12y ago
Perhaps one could pay for the content that he/she downloads with cpu time and RAM temporal storage, something akin to a distributed dropbox.
- copsarebastards 12y ago
  A friend of mine worked on a project that tried to do distributed RAM temporal storage circa 2005. The company went under because after 4 years 6 engineers couldn't get it to reliably work even though they controlled most of the participating machines. This is a very hard problem.
  - anonymousDan 12y ago
    "RAM temporal storage" - what exactly do you mean by temporal storage? I've never heard the term before.
    - copsarebastards 12y ago
      Basically the idea is to do long-term storage in short-term memory (RAM) by distributing the storage across many machines. One one machine you shouldn't store stuff you want stored long-term in short-term memory (RAM) because as soon as the short-term memory loses power the data is gone. RAM temporal storage attempts to mitigate this problem by duplicating the data across many many machines so that if one machine powers off, the other machines still have the data. This is sort of a holy grail of distributed computing because it could allow people to elastically donate their storage similarly to how people donate their CPU cycles to Folding@Home or GPU cycles to BTC mining. The idea is that a lot of your CPU cycles (for example) are wasted because you aren't doing anything on your computer, so you can donate those cycles to Folding@Home. You could do something similar with RAM, but RAM is different: if I decide to run a program and start using my CPU cycles again Folding@Home can just push computation to another machine. But if I decide to reclaim RAM from a distributed computing system to run a program on my machine, then whatever the system was storing in RAM is lost, and if they need that, they a) need to have it duplicated elsewhere, and b) need to know how to retrieve it efficiently from a network of computers any of which may or may not actually have the data. This has proven to be a very hard problem to solve in practice.
jasonkester 12y ago
Somebody needs to start a service that lets you pay for the movies you download via BitTorrent. Torrented movies are better in pretty much every regard as compared to DVD/BluRay. No ads, no unskippable videos telling you not to pirate the disc you just bought, no 2 minute unskippable disc title intro, etc. Double click the file and it plays the movie. That's worth paying for. I'd pay for that over Disks in the mail from Amazon if it were possible to do so. If there was a service that let me paste in a .torrent, pay $10, and have them forward it to the studio, life would be good. Instead, we get iTunes, which somehow manages to make the movie watching process more painful than DVDs.
- ollysb 12y ago
  Being able to get subtitles for anh film is another benefit vs iTunes etc.
joncameron 12y ago
Have you used uTorrent recently? They've had an unshrinkable ad area in the main window for a while. Torrent sites are full of ads too; I'm willing to wager that there are plenty of advertisers willing to put ads up in non-traditional spaces. It's not going to be Proctor&Gamble, but revenue's getting made for sure. Not to mentioned the "bundled" crapware being discussed.
- keslag 12y ago
  Hence my last sentence...
yclept 12y ago
Why does it need to be monetized?
- gillianseed 12y ago
  Because Bittorrent inc bought it for (I assume) a decent sum of money and now they are desperately from the looks of it, trying to recoup on their investment. From an end user perspective it sucks, but like others have mentioned there are lots of FOSS alternatives, I'd wager Transmission is the most popular.

by keslag 12y ago

harperlee 12y ago

Perhaps one could pay for the content that he/she downloads with cpu time and RAM temporal storage, something akin to a distributed dropbox.

copsarebastards 12y ago
A friend of mine worked on a project that tried to do distributed RAM temporal storage circa 2005. The company went under because after 4 years 6 engineers couldn't get it to reliably work even though they controlled most of the participating machines. This is a very hard problem.
- anonymousDan 12y ago
  "RAM temporal storage" - what exactly do you mean by temporal storage? I've never heard the term before.
  - copsarebastards 12y ago
    Basically the idea is to do long-term storage in short-term memory (RAM) by distributing the storage across many machines. One one machine you shouldn't store stuff you want stored long-term in short-term memory (RAM) because as soon as the short-term memory loses power the data is gone. RAM temporal storage attempts to mitigate this problem by duplicating the data across many many machines so that if one machine powers off, the other machines still have the data. This is sort of a holy grail of distributed computing because it could allow people to elastically donate their storage similarly to how people donate their CPU cycles to Folding@Home or GPU cycles to BTC mining. The idea is that a lot of your CPU cycles (for example) are wasted because you aren't doing anything on your computer, so you can donate those cycles to Folding@Home. You could do something similar with RAM, but RAM is different: if I decide to run a program and start using my CPU cycles again Folding@Home can just push computation to another machine. But if I decide to reclaim RAM from a distributed computing system to run a program on my machine, then whatever the system was storing in RAM is lost, and if they need that, they a) need to have it duplicated elsewhere, and b) need to know how to retrieve it efficiently from a network of computers any of which may or may not actually have the data. This has proven to be a very hard problem to solve in practice.

jasonkester 12y ago

Somebody needs to start a service that lets you pay for the movies you download via BitTorrent. Torrented movies are better in pretty much every regard as compared to DVD/BluRay. No ads, no unskippable videos telling you not to pirate the disc you just bought, no 2 minute unskippable disc title intro, etc. Double click the file and it plays the movie. That's worth paying for. I'd pay for that over Disks in the mail from Amazon if it were possible to do so. If there was a service that let me paste in a .torrent, pay $10, and have them forward it to the studio, life would be good. Instead, we get iTunes, which somehow manages to make the movie watching process more painful than DVDs.

ollysb 12y ago
Being able to get subtitles for anh film is another benefit vs iTunes etc.

joncameron 12y ago

Have you used uTorrent recently? They've had an unshrinkable ad area in the main window for a while. Torrent sites are full of ads too; I'm willing to wager that there are plenty of advertisers willing to put ads up in non-traditional spaces. It's not going to be Proctor&Gamble, but revenue's getting made for sure. Not to mentioned the "bundled" crapware being discussed.

keslag 12y ago
Hence my last sentence...

yclept 12y ago

Why does it need to be monetized?

gillianseed 12y ago
Because Bittorrent inc bought it for (I assume) a decent sum of money and now they are desperately from the looks of it, trying to recoup on their investment. From an end user perspective it sucks, but like others have mentioned there are lots of FOSS alternatives, I'd wager Transmission is the most popular.