A report from U.K. data research firm MUSO says that traffic to piracy websites in 2022 has increased 22% with TV content—the largest media sector—representing 46.6% of pirated content.
The report—which measured traffic to piracy websites from January to August 2022—said 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%. As far as delivery of this unlicensed content is concerned, 53.9% of traffic is for unlicensed streaming sites vs 46.1% for download sites (which includes torrents and cyberlockers).
MUSO measured 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.
In terms of analyzing each media sector directly to get a truer picture of delivery trends, MUSO said streaming accounts for 95.1% of traffic for TV content whereas downloads accounted for 99% of Publishing traffic and 100% of software piracy traffic.
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 U.K. in 7th place.
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,” the researcher said. “Audience measurement data is critical for optimum enforcement strategies but can also be used to better understand the audience for business intelligence.”
