According to a study, the impact of piracy on series audiences is not only negative. The “buzz” generated by illegal downloading on social media partly compensates for the loss of earnings it generates.
Regularly targeted by the audiovisual industry, piracy is often mentioned when it comes to finding someone responsible for the drop in audience or turnover of a particular platform or television channel. It must be said that its negative impact is very clear and difficult to regulate by the competent authorities. And some services suffer more than others, Disney + can testify.
No more hacking, no more “buzz”
But a study tried to see the glass half full on this subject, for once. Published in the journal Information & Management, it was supervised by a Korean researcher named Dongyeon Kim. He analyzed the way in which piracy affects the number of spectators in front of such or such content, but also the word-of-mouth aroused by the latter.
The research team surveyed the audiences of 20 television programs, including Arrow, Lucifer, Supernatural, The Flash or Blacklist (this part of the study was conducted in 2018). The researchers then compared this activity with the number of Internet users who downloaded this content on BitTorrent during the same period, and search trends and mentions on Google, Twitter and YouTube.
First observation, a highly pirated series will indeed and logically tend to lead to a drop in the number of legal spectators. But the analysis does not stop there. According to the study, illegal downloading also increases the “buzz” around the program in question. Adverse effects would even be greatly reduced —”diluted“, to use the terms of the study – by this extra attention.
An even more noticeable effect at the end of the season
Less popular series would particularly benefit from the digital word-of-mouth generated by piracy, and the effect would be even stronger in the second half of the seasons. Logical, since the platforms generally bet a lot on the launch of a new program, before letting its reputation be made once the first episodes have passed. The “buzz” would allow the less marketed series to make their way through the dense jungle of countless programs that come out each month.
In the end, if the first part of the season suffers from piracy, the noise generated thanks to the latter at the end of the season balances the accounts, attenuates its negative effects and even coincides in certain cases with better legal hearings. A statement that will probably not make many people agree in Hollywood, but which had already been defended by David Petrarca almost a decade ago. As reminded TorrentFreakthis director having worked with HBO on Game Of Thrones suggested then that the piracy allowed the creation of a “cultural buzz” around the series, increasing by extension the number of potential subscriptions to the American channel.