MUSO measures visits to the entire piracy eco-system for desktop and mobile visits as well as tracking direct piracy consumption on over 388,000 TV and film titles across both the torrent network and unlicensed streaming websites.
This article analyses some of the trends observed in MUSO’s Piracy by Industry data set across the first 8 months of 2022 (January to August). This data set 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 have 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% 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% of all traffic to piracy websites amongst these media sectors.
Piracy by sector, Jan-Aug 2022. Data from MUSO.com
Looking at a year-on-year comparison from January to August 2022 vs January to August 2021 for each media sector we can see that piracy has increased in every industry sector with film piracy traffic showing the highest growth by 49.1%. Music saw the lowest increase of 3.87%.
Piracy % increase by industry, Jan-Aug 2022 vs Jan-Aug 2021. Data from MUSO.com
The weekend peaks of demand can be clearly seen when viewed daily traffic volume for each of the key media sectors.
Daily visits to piracy sites by media sector Jan-Aug 2022. Data from MUSO.com
Analysing the breakdown between delivery method of unlicensed content 53.9% of traffic is for unlicensed streaming sites vs 46.1% for download sites (which includes torrents and cyberlockers).
Streaming vs Download, all media sectors, Jan to August 2022. Data from MUSO.com
However, we need to analyse each media sector directly to get a truer picture of delivery trends. Streaming accounts for 95.1% of traffic for TV content whereas downloads accounted for 99% of Publishing traffic and 100% of software piracy traffic.
Delivery method by media sector, Jan to August 2022. Data from MUSO.com
Viewed by geographic distribution, the United States accounts for 10.9% of piracy between Jan-Aug 2022 and is 87.3% higher than Russia in second place. The highest European country is France in fifth place, followed by the UK in 7th place.
When analysing the data by referral sites 61.5% of traffic is direct with only 28.4% of piracy traffic going via search engines.
Piracy by referal Jan-Aug 2022. Data from MUSO.com
Summary
MUSO Piracy by Industry data reveals deep trends about the piracy ecosystem and is employed by many global governments, trade bodies and Intellectual Property Offices to provide deep insights into the fast changing and dynamic piracy landscape.
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.
ABOUT MUSO
MUSO is a data company that provides the most complete and trusted view of unlicensed media consumption and global piracy demand. MUSO’s unrivalled dataset measures a vast high intent audience that is not influenced by licensing restriction or platform bias. Whether protecting IP or building winning content strategies, MUSO helps companies make better decisions that drive performance, ROI and value.
Source: photo by Markus Spiske