A word of advice to film and television execs frustrated by online video piracy: Stay away from superheroes.

Over the last six months, the hit graphic novel adaptation Watchmen and the popular NBC series Heroes ranked as the most often illegally downloaded movie and TV show, according to data tracked by peer-to-peer piracy research firm Big Champagne.

The simple lesson? Geeky young males–like many less piracy-capable viewers–don’t necessarily like to pay for their entertainment. “I don’t want to engage in too much stereotyping, but who are the people most actively helping themselves arm over arm to all this free video content?” asks Big Champagne Chief Executive Eric Garland. “They’re going to be geek-leaning. Just think about how many Comic Con visitors are also heavy Bittorrent users.”

Tags: Videos

The art student hadn’t even originally planned to upload his video to the Internet. But he entered the work in the Adobe ( ADBE - news - people ) Design Achievement Awards, an annual contest for designers, and as part of that entry, he had to post it on YouTube. His piece has since made it into the Adobe contest semifinals. Finalists will be notified on August 10.

Liu put his video online on June 5, linked to it on his Facebook profile and submitted it to Booooooom.com, a blog that curates and exhibits the work of artists and designers. Five days later, he was surprised to find that the video had been viewed more than 200,000 times on YouTube and people had posted hundreds of comments.

217 blog：The Year’s Most Pirated Videos tag： Videos cat：Videos
A word of advice to film and television execs frustrated by online video piracy: Stay away from superheroes.

Over the last six months, the hit graphic novel adaptation Watchmen and the popular NBC series Heroes ranked as the most often illegally downloaded movie and TV show, according to data tracked by peer-to-peer piracy research firm Big Champagne.

The simple lesson? Geeky young males–like many less piracy-capable viewers–don’t necessarily like to pay for their entertainment. “I don’t want to engage in too much stereotyping, but who are the people most actively helping themselves arm over arm to all this free video content?” asks Big Champagne Chief Executive Eric Garland. “They’re going to be geek-leaning. Just think about how many Comic Con visitors are also heavy Bittorrent users.”

Tags: Videos