Lockdowns and travel bans have caused more content to be consumed online than ever. However, what does not stop plummeting is the income from web pages that allow pir-ted downloads, as revealed by a study.
The study, prepared by the cybersecurity company Group-IB , shows that revenues have fallen for the third consecutive year for this type of portals in Russia. In 2018, revenue in the sector was estimated at $ 87 million. In 2019, however, large actions against large pir-te portals carried out by BREIN, MPA and ACE caused revenues to drop 27% to $ 63 million. Now, in 2020, the figure has fallen 7% again, dropping to $ 59 million.
Pir-te website closures strangle your revenue
To this is added that there are more and more legal options to view content. During the year of the confinements, the number of people watching streaming reached 63 million people, 17% more than the previous year, with revenues generated of around 365.7 million dollars . However, the demand for free movies and series also increased by 12% on Yandex, Russia’s most popular search engine, with a total of 11.8 billion searches.
Thus, the money paid for every 1,000 visits by advertisers fell from 6 to 5 dollars in 2020, 17% less. The closure of CDNs such as Moonwalk, HDGO and Kodik has helped that fall, and other CDNs have failed to take advantage of the pull of those services.
Users hack more, and use more advanced methods
However, users are increasingly discovering alternative methods to access content, such as using alternative URLs or links that change and redirect. Thus, despite falling revenues and legal services having more audience than ever, pir-cy also continues to grow in audience. The only thing is that they can’t earn as much money for it as they used to.
Despite the drop in revenue, pir-cy portals will continue to triumph because in most cases the benefits outweigh the costs. Of course, the fight against pir-cy is proving effective, especially against pir-te IPTV portals. With torrenting, this is more complicated, since proxies can be opened easily and the cost of storage is quite low compared to streaming or direct downloading.