Piracy sites make $227m a year from advertising
A report published by US watchdog Digital Citizens Alliance has unveiled top pirate websites make $227 million in advertising revenue annually.
The 29-page report, titled Good Money Gone Bad: Digital Thieves and the Hijacking of the Online Ad Business, finds the 30 major torrent sites each make $US4.4 million annually with small content theft sites making as much as $US100,000 in ad revenue.
Published this month, the report finds nearly 30% of large content theft sites like The Pirate Bay and Bitsnoop feature premium brand ads from major brands including McDonald’s, Lego, Amazon and Xfinity and 40% of those sites feature legitimate secondary brand ads.
Premium and secondary brand advertisers aren’t protected by current digital and advertising practices as they are sourced, like most Internet advertising, through what the report calls “blind sales channels”. They have no control of where their ads appear and on offending sites can sit alongside ads with links to malicious software and ads for sex trafficking or illegal drugs.
The Digital Citizens Alliance argue their findings are unfair to creative workers, with theft sites using a business model (illicitly distributing the valuable works of creatives) that sees profit margins range from 80%-94%.
The Good Money Gone Bad report includes a recommendation from the Digital Citizens Alliance where the company behove brand marketers to “press agencies, ad networks and exchanges to strengthen current blocking methods and to develop new ones.”
