Measurements, analysis, and modeling of BitTorrent-like systems
IMC '05 Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet Measurement
Clustering and sharing incentives in BitTorrent systems
Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
Uplink allocation beyond choke/unchoke: or how to divide and conquer best
CoNEXT '08 Proceedings of the 2008 ACM CoNEXT Conference
BitTorrent or BitCrunch: Evidence of a Credit Squeeze in BitTorrent?
WETICE '09 Proceedings of the 2009 18th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructures for Collaborative Enterprises
On the leakage of personally identifiable information via online social networks
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM workshop on Online social networks
Content availability and bundling in swarming systems
Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies
LEET'10 Proceedings of the 3rd USENIX conference on Large-scale exploits and emergent threats: botnets, spyware, worms, and more
Strange bedfellows: community identification in bittorrent
IPTPS'10 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Peer-to-peer systems
Do incentives build robustness in bit torrent
NSDI'07 Proceedings of the 4th USENIX conference on Networked systems design & implementation
Unraveling the BitTorrent Ecosystem
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
The bittorrent p2p file-sharing system: measurements and analysis
IPTPS'05 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Peer-to-Peer Systems
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BitTorrent is the most popular peer-to-peer (P2P) content delivery application where individual users share various types of content with tens of thousands of other users. The growing popularity of BitTorrent is primarily due to the availability of valuable content without any cost for the consumers. However, apart from the required resources, publishing valuable (and often copyrighted) content has serious legal implications for the users who publish the material. This raises the question that whether (at least major) content publishers behave in an altruistic fashion or have other motives such as financial incentives. In this paper, we identify the content publishers of more than 55 K torrents in two major BitTorrent portals and examine their characteristics. We discover that around 100 publishers are responsible for publishing 67% of the content, which corresponds to 75% of the downloads. Our investigation reveals several key insights about major publishers. First, antipiracy agencies and malicious users publish "fake" files to protect copyrighted content and spread malware, respectively. Second, excluding the fake publishers, content publishing in major BitTorrent portals appears to be largely driven by companies that try to attract consumers to their own Web sites for financial gain. Finally, we demonstrate that profit-driven publishers attract more loyal consumers than altruistic top publishers, whereas the latter have a larger fraction of loyal consumers with a higher degree of loyalty than the former.