BitTorrent: Not the nemesis?!

For media companies - especially film and TV ones - BitTorrent file-sharing is usually the enemy. This week, a real twist: "ADV Films, the largest distributor of anime in the United States, has decided to make the best of a bad situation," the New York Times reports. "To publicize its new series 'Gilgamesh' and 'Goddanar,' it is releasing promotional packages - not in stores, but via the dreaded BitTorrent." The reason: smart marketing. Giving freebies or extras - "biographical information about the characters, images and statistics of the giant robots, promotional clips and links to online reviews" - to the vast numbers of devoted anime fans to seed interest in new content is just plain efficient. It's much more efficient than conventional media marketing because anime fans share digitally over the Net, and BitTorrent sometimes has more users than the Web itself (see this 2004 graph by Net traffic-measuring firm CacheLogic; BitTorrent is gray, the Web is red). For more on what happened last week, see CNET's "When script kiddies play with fire on the Internet". For a parent's warning on the *darkside* of anime on the Web (certainly not all of it), see my recent feature "A mom writes: Yaoi not for kids!".