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TV blog, SoapHub, took a deep dive into the murky waters of torrent downloads and the results are kind of surprising, if not a bit odd. I mean, not that people are searching for pirated copies of paywalled shows, or even the most-downloaded shows, but the state that comes top of the pile when searching for illegal content to download, that’s a shocker.
It’s California, but purely on the number of searches. Now, that’s not that surprising because California has some 11 million more residents than the next biggest state, Texas. Let’s see how that ranking changes if we add in a per population calculation.
New research ranks US states by the amount of illegally watched TV shows they consume
Image: KnowTechie
See, once we add population into the mix, the picture changes. California is no longer in the top ten, it drops all the way to 35th place. Rhode Island, however, climbs way up to first place, from a measly 38th. I guess there’s nothing to do in Rhode Island other than work and torrent Game of Thrones, which by the way, was the most illegally downloaded TV show of last year.
SoapHub looked at search term analysis to see how many people searched to illegally stream popular shows each month, then used Keyword.io to compile those results. The thing is, how many of those searches were acted on? I mean, maybe they searched, and gave up because installing torrent software or wading through advertising and popups was too much work. It also doesn’t say if the same households searched multiple times, which would inflate the figures somewhat.
I’m also not sure where the figures for downloads come from. Saying Game of Thrones was downloaded illegally 38,000 times on average per month. I mean, the first episode of Season 8 had 55 million pirated views, in the first 24 hours after airing. Even with just four million of those views coming from inside the United States (per MUSO), that’s still over 330,000 if you average the first 24 hours over 12 months (and discount all further views).
I’m not discounting that Game of Thrones was the most illegally watched show of 2019 though, with TorrentFreak even crediting it with increasing overall torrent activity in the year. It’s weird to me that only a few short months afterward, nobody is talking about the show anymore, for something that was part of our daily consciousness for nearly a decade.
What do you think? Surprised by these torrent numbers or does it seem about right? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.
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