MUSO launches Piracy by Industry Dashboard
October 8, 2018
By Colin Mann
Digital piracy data analysis specialist MUSO has launched its Piracy by Industry Dashboard, which will give trade bodies and government-level organisations access to month-by-month piracy data across all their industries. This rolling insight will allow trade bodies to gain a more accurate view of piracy and enable them to regularly assess the effectiveness of their strategies.
By empowering trade bodies with insights into piracy activity every month and giving them access to data specifically tailored to the industry they operate in, MUSO will enable them to react quickly to unfolding trends and regularly reassess their strategy. One of the key features of the Dashboard is the new monthly updated insights into the top piracy domains. This will give MUSO Discover customers the ability to review top piracy sites – which will feed into wider protection strategies: for example, informing and measuring the impact of geo-blocking tactics. Additionally, the ability to compare trends over time, across multiple regions, will allow users to benchmark the extent of activity in a given region.
“The consumption method and sources of unlicensed content are constantly shifting,” said Jonathan Frost, Head of Product at MUSO. “This turbulence limits the efficiency with which content protection teams can adapt their anti-piracy strategy, push for policy changes, and take timely legal action. We believe our new interactive dashboard will go a long way towards helping trade bodies solve this issue. For the first time, they’ll be able to access the information they need to reliably measure and inform their strategies throughout the year.”
The Piracy Industry Dashboard will enable trade bodies to break down the data by industry, region, date and delivery method, to better understand how audiences are accessing unlicensed content. The new Dashboard also allows for comparison of trends month-on-month.
Through the Dashboard, it is possible to zero in on a particular piracy method known as ‘stream ripping’ – which allows streaming media content to be saved to a locally accessible file. When looking at MUSO’s piracy data, across all regions for content that was delivered via stream ripper in the first half of 2017 the top ranking site was youtube-mp3.org.
However, youtube-mp3.org closed down in September 2017, and MUSO data shows that by the last quarter of 2017 it had been replaced by onlinevideoconverter.com as the most popular source for stream ripping.
MUSO’s view of piracy site visits over time also shows an interesting correlation during that month, with a spike recorded as traffic moves around trying to find new sources of supply. This is a clearly visible shift in traffic toward alternative ripper domains as users test out different sites for the content they’re seeking. In fact, when comparing data for the months of August and September 2017, search traffic to stream ripper sites increased from 44.9 per cent of all sources to 46.6 per cent, as audiences actively sought out new domains and the relative share of stream ripping sites increased from 4.3 per cent of all piracy visits to 5.1 per cent of all piracy visits.
“For the first time, MUSO customers will be able to accurately measure how and where unlicensed content is accessed, as people move around the web,” added Frost, “This addresses one of the biggest challenges with anti-piracy strategies – measuring their effectiveness.”