Study: TV almost half piracy website traffic
October 12, 2022
By Colin Mann
Findings from digital piracy data specialist MUSO, which measure visits to the entire piracy eco-system, indicate that the largest media sector was TV content, which accounted for 46.6 per cent of all traffic to piracy websites.
MUSO’s Piracy by Industry data set across the first eight months of 2022 (January to August measures industry-wide traffic and piracy demand for the film, TV, music, software and publishing sectors across unlicensed streaming, torrent download, web download and stream ripping websites.
The first eight months of 2022 revealed some marked trends on MUSO’s Piracy by Industry data, from January to August 2022 MUSO measured 141.7 billion visits to piracy sites for all industries, this is a 21.9 per cent increase over the same period of 2021.
When broken down into individual media Industries, the largest media sector was TV which includes TV, Anime, Live Sports and Live Broadcasts. TV content accounted for 46.6 per cent of all traffic to piracy websites amongst these media sectors.
Looking at a year-on-year comparison from January to August 2022 vs January to August 2021 for each media sector MUSO notes that piracy has increased in every industry sector, with film piracy traffic showing the highest growth by 49.1 per cent. Music saw the lowest increase of 3.87 per cent.
Analysing the breakdown between delivery method of unlicensed content 53.9 per cent of traffic is for unlicensed streaming sites vs 46.1 per cent for download sites (which includes torrents and cyberlockers).
“However, we need to analyse each media sector directly to get a truer picture of delivery trends,” says MUSO. Streaming accounts for 95.1 per cent of traffic for TV content, whereas downloads accounted for 99 per cent of Publishing traffic and 100 per cent of software piracy traffic.
Viewed by geographic distribution, the United States accounts for 10.9 per cent of piracy between January and August 2022 and is 87.3 per cent higher than Russia in second place. The highest European country is France in fifth place, followed by the UK in seventh place.
When analysing the data by referral sites, 61.5 per cent of traffic is direct with only 28.4 per cent of piracy traffic going via search engines.
According to MUSO, the increase in piracy measured year on year to date, has been driven by various factors. These include:
- More content being released following the Covid-19 delay.
- Proliferation of global and regionalised easy to access piracy websites.
- Increased exclusive content behind various VoD platforms.
- Geo-restricted content, where titles are not available in every country.
“What is clear is global audience demand for media and entertainment content is increasing and piracy remains an accessible and perhaps preferred method of consumption. Audience measurement data is critical for optimum enforcement strategies but can also be used to better understand the audience for business intelligence,” concludes MUSO.