News

Pirate Websites Generate $227 Million A Year From Ad Revenue

Reports show that pirate websites make a fortune out of advertising. The Digital Citizens Alliance is said to have released a detailed report emphasising how much piracy websites are making in ad revenue.

The report is named “Good Money Gone Bad: Digital Thieves and the Hijacking of the Online Ad Business” and states that pirate websites having TV shows, music, movies, etc. as content made a staggering $227 million in annual ad revenue in 2013.

The number of ad positions, page views and estimates of the different ad-rates were used to generate the report’s statistics and the websites were divided into three sizes based on the number of unique visitors per month, which are ‘Small’ ( lower than 1 million), ‘Medium’ (between 1 and 5 million) and ‘Large’ (over 5 million). It is also said that sampled websites are the ones for which Google received 25 or more DMCA takedown requests during the third quarter of 2013.

The statistics inside the report were taken from 596 websites, out of which 30 were the largest sites and the top torrent sites which made profits margins of around $6 million a year. Also, profit margins up to 94.1 percent were made by torrent sites, taking up less than 1/4 of the total sample and half of the total ad revenue.

The reports states that a large part of the total ad revenue comes from premium brands like McDonalds, Ford, Dell, Amazon, and others, brands that are not aware of this themselves, but the DCA states that this could damage their reputation.

Thank you Tech Spot for providing us with this information

Gabriel Roşu

Disqus Comments Loading...

Recent Posts

Twitch Now Banning All Content Focusing On Intimate Body Parts

As by now, I'm sure you are aware Twitch has decided to go ahead and…

16 hours ago

Seconds Patch of “Operation Medic Bag” For Payday 3 Released

I doubt many of you have been keeping up with Payday 3 which is understandable…

17 hours ago

MSI Announces SPATIUM M580 FROZR With A Huge Cooler

Today MSI has announced a new Gen 5 SSD, the SPATIUM M580 FROZR which comes…

17 hours ago

LENRUE PC Speakers, USB/USB-C Powered Computer Speakers with Loud Stereo Sound

Stereo and Noiseless - Without any noise! After multiple debugging, suppress static. Become clearer and…

18 hours ago

HP M27f Ultraslim Monitor 27 Inch

PICTURE-PERFECT IMMERSION – Work or play on a monitor that redefines high definition with its…

18 hours ago

Govee LED Light Bars, Smart WiFi RGBIC TV Backlight

Syncs With Your Music: With an internal high-sensitivity mic, Govee Flow Plus LED light bars…

18 hours ago