Who conducts the crappiest polls?

MPAA versus El Reg: the Mother of all Polls

By Lester Haines • Get more from this author

Posted in Bootnotes, 15th July 2004 15:25 GMT

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Poll Our recent poll to determine how many people actually download movies illegally from the Internet - as opposed to how many the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) reckons are involved in this nefarious activity - caused a bit of a rumpus among Reg readers.

The MPAA says that a quarter of Net users download films via the Web. Our survey has, shockingly, revealed that the figure is actually 57 PER CENT (at time of writing). This suggests that at any one moment, 1.7bn people across the globe are downloading Lord of the Rings, 538m souls are enjoying Paris Hilton's night-vision beast with two backs vid while only around 11 individuals are using the Internet for educational or non-film-related recreational purposes.

Many readers did, however, write in to point out that our methodology is completely shot. Some of them became quite indignant about it - so much so that we were forced to break the glass on our emergency "JOKE ALERT" gif and run screaming to the nearest hostelry:

We later decided that those who had raised legitimate concerns about how we conducted our survey should be given a chance to register their outrage. Accordingly, we have prepared another poll, entitled: "Who conducts the crappiest polls?" This is, we hasten to add, the Mother of all Polls. Its findings will be considered the last word on the matter, and its results transmitted via breathless press release to news agencies world-wide. Go to it:

Who conducts the crappiest polls?