The Globe has a story of internet gloom and doom: Canadian children are running amok across broadband internet, downloading anything not passworded down!
The illegal downloading has cost retail music stores more than half a billion dollars in lost sales since 1999, a study by Pollara for the recording industry estimates.
While some observers believe Internet piracy is a widespread phenomenon, most illegal file swapping is done by younger Canadians, the Pollara report sys (sic).
Canadians between 12 and 24 years of age are responsible for 78 per cent of illegal music downloading, even though they make up only 21 per cent of the population, it says.
Wired Mag recently claimed that 30% of all internet traffic is BitTorrent movie transfers so this is no big bit of news. But I was curious as to this company Pollara…
According to their website, Pollara conducts market research using up-to-the-minute internet technology like “Rogers@home”.
“Rogers@home”? That hasn’t been around for about 5 years now.
Oh wait a minute. Looking back at Pollara’s homepage, you can see that the copyright branding is stuck at year 2000. Even the “Chairman’s message” is dated June 6th, 2000 (funnily enough, the HTML file is called “chairmess”). He hasn’t said anything more relevant regarding market research or online studies since the dotcom bust? It certainly validates all their hard work in their internet research when their “Web Based Services” section reads like a pre-bust-how-we-gonna-make-money-on-dis-innnernet-thing manifesto, while all the links on their “Remote Viewing via VPN Webcast” page (including the ever-so curious “demonstration”) are dead. In an ironic statement from their site they offer “your producers, designers and marketers (to) attend a session where customers give instant feedback on your site’s design.” Coming from a site that seems like it hasn’t been updated in years, I say “Physician, heal thyself.”
This is obviously a company that knows how to conduct internet research, by golly! Like their study where they find that men are more likely to swear at their computers when frustrated.
Wow. Shocker.
To be fair, I have noticed that Pollara has been called “one of Canada’s best known and most respected polling firms” (Broadcaster Magazine) so maybe they’re good on the ground, but they certainly don’t instill any confidence in me to trust them on the web.
