The new battleground for Piracy: Social Media

The new battleground for Piracy: Social Media

28 October 2016

Articles Piracy

We all remember that dress that could have been blue and black or white and golden. We have also witnessed how memes have become a part of daily life. Of course, greater things are known to happen in the Internet, let’s not forget that Mubarak’s fall began in Twitter and that Argentina’s rape awareness campaign made it all around the globe in less than a day. This and much more we have witnessed through social media.

Why, then, do we assume that social media won’t be as important in piracy?

During the Brazil World Cup, the social media constantly buzzed with different links to watch it illegally. Among these, Facebook was the fifth most popular.

This means we cannot keep turning a blind eye on the risk the Film Industry faces in piracy through social media. According to an article on Torrent Freak, the 10 countries where more piracy goes on worldwide are European. Number five is Spain.

In the UK alone, the yearly loss theaters experience due to piracy comes up to £220 million according to The Guardian. And in the data published by the Spanish Cinema Yearbook, the Industry made in revenue only a fifth of what it lost to piracy.

This is due to the way in which users share every thought and action through social media in real-time. Social media’s virality has long stopped being a myth to become a given. And it is through it that links to illegal content are spread. They are shared the same way we saw an Englishman beat a Spaniard for not being an English speaker.

Digital Marketing Budget

Distributing houses, furthermore, direct about 5 to 6% of their marketing budgets to social media, according to Ken Miyamoto of Sony Pictures. If we factor that a video can get up to 1 million views within 30 minutes, like was the case for The Force Awakens trailer, this is actually a very low conversion cost.

However, as they compete with piracy, which amounts to approximately half of the content found, the exposure users have to the official content is proportionately decreased. Now, each view costs double than what it would.

Big distributors, though, are not the only ones affected. Piracy damages the Industry down to its most simple roots. In Spain alone, in the past 10 years, 24% of the movie screens in cinemas have been shut down, according to Cine y Tele’s data.

It might seem like it’s not much, but this translates into less space to screen movies and projection periods much shorter. Movies have less and less legal exposure time to consumers and if we add that DVD releases tend to be around 90 days after the movies premiere, we are facing a recipe for disaster.

This is no time to underestimate social media. The business world took too long to realize the real profit they could get from them through marketing. We should not wait to see the damage that piracy can do through these means.


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3ANTS is a content protection company that specializes in fighting the threat of piracy with innovative technology and a qualified team of experts on piracy. Specialized software and custom-made processes offer the best protection on the market. If you want to know more about our services, please contact us.

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