According to a new study carried out on the Indian and Brazilian markets, the blocking of pirate sites does indeed benefit legal streaming offers like Netflix or Disney+.
In 2019, a study by Carnegie Mellon University (Pennsylvania) proved that blocking pirate sites did indeed favor legal offers, namely streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney+ or even Amazon Prime Video.
However, the researchers behind this report made it clear at the time that only massive blocking operations (i.e. several sites at the same time) turned out to be really effective. In any case, these are the results observed by these scientists for the British market. But what about other territories?
Blocking pirate sites is effective in most markets
As relayed by our colleagues from the Torrent Freak site, researchers from Chapman University and Carnegie Mellon used a similar working method to observe the effects of blocking pirate sites in India and Brazil.
Concerning India, researchers studied the consequences of two successive waves of blockades carried out by the country’s authorities. The first took place in December 2019 against 380 pirate websites. As for the second, it resulted in the closure of 173 sites in September 2020.
Concretely, the results obtained are similar to those of the British market. The 1st wave triggered an increase in traffic on legal sites of 8.1%. The second: 3.1%. Furthermore, visits to pirate sites still available have not increased. To summarize, blocking operations seem to increase consumption on legal streaming platforms. At least for the Indian market.
Also read: IPTV and streaming represent 95% of television piracy in France
The particular case of Brazil
Indeed, things are a little different in Brazil. For good reason, scientists focused on a series of blocking launched against 174 pirate sites in July 2021. If traffic on Netflix and others actually increased by 5.2%, visits to other pirate sites still active have increased considerably.
“In Brazil, we found that blocking 174 piracy sites led to a statistically significant increase in visits to unblocked piracy sites, thereby dispersing some piracy,” write the researchers. Despite everything, the results of this new study confirm that “Blocking pirate websites remains an effective strategy for increasing legal consumption of copyrighted content.
However, the report has a gap. He doesn’t dwell on the lasting effect of blockages on users’ consumption habits. Indeed, it is entirely possible that users will eventually return to other pirate sites after a few months. This is what researchers call the “relapse” effect. Brett Danaher, lead author of the study, is aware of this shortcoming. However, obtaining data over longer periods is a real obstacle course according to him.
Source: Torrent Freak