Jawaad Mahmood in Tokyo

Back when I was working at Searching.com, one of the final things our CEO tried was  “acquiring” a bunch of Torrent sites and “legalizing” them by “moving torrents off the front page”.  Apparently my boss now believed that piracy was “shit” and that he could build a giant new torrent site (“Bitzip”) that would be composed of traffic from pirate torrent sites.  The Bitzip family of torrent sites would delete all pirate torrents from the front pages  (and off the sites entirely as soon as possible).   Instead of Hollywood movies and RIAA Music, people would be attracted in droves by  “Indy Movies” and “Indy Music”, as well as an “Indy film festival” where grateful independent film producers would submit their films (for free) so as to get a shot at the big time.

Please note: None of this was my idea, so please don’t yell at me.

The strategy probably sounds insane to you; the mainstream doesn’t really have a use for legal torrents, and no one really is interested in most indy movies.  Sadly, the underlying reasoning is a depressingly common one;  I do not begrudge my old boss for falling prey to it’s temptation.  The underlying logic was  “If we can even turn 1% of the site’s users into users of a legitimate site, the site’s valuation will go up significantly.  We can then flip it or display more valuable ads on it”.

While there is a case to be made about getting rid of “demon customers” from a big box store, you’d be insane to try to eliminate 99% of your customers.  Furthermore, the various users that form a pre-existing base are a community; to toss 99% of a large community out the door is madness.  Even the original European settlers did not exterminate 99% of the Native Americans (despite seeing them as savages).   There is something inherently immoral about walking into someone’s space and throwing them out.

Furthermore, a strategy that sees 99% of the audience as being expendable is not significantly different from one that sees 100% of the audience as being expendable.  It is undermines the lifeblood of the site (the self-sufficient community, no small feat!).   It’s effectively saying “dump everything, but keep the domain name; I like the domain name”.  This is insanity; why bother purchasing the site in the first place?  This sort of strategy stinks of failure; it is like Napster 2009, a zombie creation that bares no resemblance to what made it popular.

What would I have done, had I been in control?  For argument’s sake, if I was strong-armed into purchasing such websites, I would maintain constructive engagement with the community.  The Pirate Bay coders did pretty well in regards to constructive engagement, by doing thing such as building privacy-enhancing tools.  However, unlike the owners of TPB, I would try to get away from piracy long-term by growing the userbase to escape from the illegality trap.  Still, the general rule would always remain;  do not alienate the early adopters of the site.

Loyalty to a userbase has benefits too; they become your willing guinea pigs.  The benefit of torrent users / pirates are that they are at the forefront of file-sharing technologies and pretty good at dealing with arcane technologies.  Dealing with their issues could have many economic benefits.  By improving the efficiency of file sharing, I could use the lessons learned to implement a workflow methodology / software bundle to sell to companies.  　Or maybe I could build a cloud sharing service; it might originate in the vile mess of piracy, but user-friendliness would undoubtedly widen its usage community.   Eventually, the pirate community might only be a small percentage of a much larger userbase.  Don’t laugh; isn’t that, after all, that’s how Youtube became popular?

The 1% strategy (AKA: sell to 1% and get rid of the rest) is shit and self-defeating.  Find a group that is more to your liking, or try to build one your own.  Top-down management might indulge the ego, but is insulting to your userbase.  In the end, isn’t that who we have to pay attention to?