If there’s any way to figure out who is stealing the most content online at this country, it’s taking a look at their favorite things.
TorrentFreak published the top 50 most-searched terms, scrubbed from the search engine of “one of the most popular torrent sites on the Internet,” on their BitTorrent Zeitgeist 2014 list this morning. The list of movies and shows clearly skews young adult, male and totally nerdy.
Most of the hot search results were either for bootlegging collectives (YIFY, nosTEAM, Nezu), file formats for high-res movie downloads (1080p, 3d) or languages like French and Hindi. But buried along the long trench of aspect ratios are a telling list of crowd favorites—for a very certain crowd, of course.
Here are the top five searches for movies:
- Guardians of the Galaxy
- Lucy
- Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
- Need for Speed
- Hercules
And the top five searches for TV shows:
- Game of Thrones
- The Walking Dead
- Arrow
- WWE
- The Flash
Other top searchs were “Batman,” “Godzilla,” “PC Games” and “PS3,” if that paints a clearer picture. We’re sure that if it weren’t on Netflix, “Attack on Titan” would have a special place in this line-up.
Along with a quick lesson about what people are desperately looking for when resorting to a life of crime, this can also be a teaching moment for film studios and distributers. As TorrentFreak points out, searches for Malayalam, Telugu and Tamil show a clear indication that there’s a demand for dubbed films that serve audiences in the India peninsula.
And the popularity of “Game of Thrones” reiterates something we’ve known all along: HBO needs their own steaming service. The only way to watch HBO shows right now—other than buying expensive DVDs or having an even more expensive cable subscription to HBO—is to get them illegally.
Luckily, we may see that service coming as soon as April. Here’s to a new year filled with a smarter media industry that gives people more reasons not to steal shit!
