"Take One Get One Free": Leveraging P2P Networks for Content Promotion

The nature of digital content is undergoing a radical transformation due to the growing infusion of user-generated content. Users that generate content have a strong motivation to actively promote their content in order to achieve publicity, recognition or to simply spread their viewpoints, knowledge and creations. Existing content sharing mechanisms available to such users, such as in P2P file sharing, are pull-based, relegating the user to a passive role. To enable active participation from users, we propose Promoter, a framework that enhances P2P file sharing systems to support content promotion in addition to the available pull-based content search. Promotion is enabled by publicizing a user´s content to peers and disseminating the content by incentivizing peers to download and further propagate it.