A quick Google search of ‘BJJ torrents’ will bring up thousands of results, and many websites that illegally provide streams and downloads of your favorite Brazilian Jiu Jitsu teachers. This practice has been going for years and far outdates the rise of BJJFanatics. Nonetheless, it’s something that can seriously harm the income of a BJJ practitioner and even if they’re already wealthy, it’s still immoral.
For example, a quick look around BJJFanatics shows that the biggest BJJ teachers online are currently the usual household names of John Danaher, Lachlan Giles, Craig Jones, Gordon Ryan and Tom DeBlass. These will all be getting their content pirated and put up on these torrent websites. You can also add Keenan Cornelius and others onto that list too who operates his own website.
To put things into further context, Robert Degle once revealed that his own videos had once been torrented over 800 times. Charging a price of $77 per video, meant that he’d lost over $61,000 in income. That’s a lot of money by anyone’s standards.
As for Degle, he was a brown belt at this point and although he’s well known in BJJ, it’s fair to say that his reach on social media and within the BJJ community isn’t as big as those listed above. By this measure, it’s not illogical to assume those are a few others have literally lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to illegal BJJ torrents.
There is of course the argument that those torrenting would never pay for BJJ videos anyway. But you can imagine a fair amount would pay which is where the money is lost.
The point here is that even well known BJJ practitioners can be living frugally as there’s still little money in the sport. This can be seen with ‘competitors houses’, or competitors selling off sponsorship clothes to try and raise cash. It happens commonly and shows how very little money is involved in the sport, even at the elite level.
Table of Contents
How much money is lost through BJJ torrents?
Firstly, it’s not just torrent sites, it’s also streaming sites and other similar methods. The exact answer to this question isn’t really known and is impossible to calculate. As mentioned above though, for the top names this runs into the hundreds of thousands. For lesser known BJJ practitioners, the number is closer to tens of thousands, which is a big deal if your job and income relies on BJJ.
Typically, people will Google search terms such as ‘John Danaher torrent’, or ‘Gordon Ryan torrent’ to find their content then go from there. Without being too dramatic about it, for some it’s also a life changing amount that we’re talking about here.
Can BJJ torrents be stopped?
The answer to this is fairly complicated, but isn’t really possible due to the logistics of the situation. Imagine someone starts a site that torrents Keenan Cornelius videos. This could be shut down with a lawsuit if it was hosted in America.
Often the torrent sites are located in obscure countries such as Russia or China, where it’s nearly impossible to shutdown such websites. Suing these hosts or getting their details proves very tricky too. As a result, they can’t really be stopped and once someone has a video, they typically spread and go viral. Even if someone did manage to shut down an entire website, there would be little stopping a similar website starting up a day later with the same streams.
Whose videos are torrented the most?
Overall, the most popular people will get torrented the most. Similarly, those with more content will also get hit the hardest. With this in mind, it’s probably between John Danaher and Gordon Ryan for whose content is torrented the most. Obviously, they have a lot of releases between them and more than just a couple of videos.
Combined with their massive popularity, it’s no surprise that they will get torrented. Further, when you add up the cost of their entire video library, it literally enters the thousands. Undoubtedly, this is excellent content and good value for money. Nonetheless, the thought of this is off putting for some and may be enough for them to turn to watching pirated BJJ material instead of paying for it.
Conclusion
Streaming BJJ videos is commonplace these days, but if you really can’t afford it, then try not to torrent. Thankfully, there’s a plethora of free, legal BJJ videos out there on a little known website named Youtube. There’s actually entire instructionals on Youtube and similar sites that are legitimately available for free.
Similarly, people will also release free material on BJJFanatics every now and then as well. With this in mind, there’s not really much reason to justify torrenting BJJ videos in 2021. The reason being, is that there’s already so much given away for free anyway and the quality is greater than ever before.
