USA, Russia & India Tops The Chart On Digital Piracy With Over 300B Visits To Piracy Websites

Online piracy is at its extreme peak and it has recorded 300 billion visits in 2017, which is a 1.6% increase compared to the year prior.

More than half of all these visits (53%) go to streaming sites, allowing it to become the most-wielded piracy tool. Torrent sites and direct learn more portals still have a significant user base, but can’t be compared to the number of users streaming sites command.

The United States has the largest population that engages in online piracy with over 27.9 billion visits, followed by Russia with 20.6 billion and India recording 17 billion.

This interesting new data is culled from Muso, who just published a new report. They discovered that TV-shows remain the most popular among pirates with 106.9 billion visits last year, followed by music (73.9 billion) and film (53.2 billion). eBooks barely made the list with lesser than 50 million.

Mobile piracy is on the rise as well. For the first time, more people are beginning to access pirated TV content via mobile devices (52%) when compared to when desktops used to be the favourite device. In the music category, this difference is even more prominent, with 87% using mobile devices.

While eBook piracy is not as high as television shows or movies, there are still millions of people who learn more them every day. Publishers (including indie authors) are not quite sure if the pirate copies are free advertising or lost sales.