The anti-record for the number of views of pirated copies of films on the Internet can be set in 2018, follows from the report of the company to prevent and investigate cybercrime Group-IB. According to the company, in 2017 the market of Internet piracy in Russia grew by 21% and reached $ 85 million the number of requests in search engines to view free copies of movies and TV series last year amounted to almost 10 billion.
In 2017, 211 copies of films from cinema screens were published on the Internet, which exceeded the figures of 2016 by more than six times. At the same time, 280 copies were published in the first nine months of 2018. Thus, almost half of the films released this year were copied and posted on the Internet.
Group-IB notes that Internet pirates are improving their technologies. Thus, to simplify the scheme of monetization and autocomplete of content on sites, scammers began to use CDN technology (Content Distribution Network, content delivery network) more often. This network brings together servers around the world that allow you to speed up the process of transferring content to the user.
"The creation and active distribution of their own pirate CDN networks has become the main and most dangerous trend in the functioning of pirate portals, - said to TASS the head of the Department of innovative protection of the brand and intellectual property of the company Group-IB Andrey Busargin. - If before the pirates had to spend significant resources on compiling a database of videos and movies to place them on the portal, the appearance of CDN-services makes it possible to quickly and easily fill the page of the site with diverse video content of good quality. If we talk about a large distribution network of films and TV series in Russia, the total number of files in the database of only one pirate CDN-service exceeds 300 thousand, which occupies more than 5 Pb of server space. At the same time, the cost of monthly maintenance of such infrastructure is about $100 thousand."
Monetization of video content depends on the volume of advertising traffic, of which more than 75% is accounted for by search engines, in 2017 it grew by 12%. The main advertisers of online pirates are online casinos and gaming sites - the average income from 1 thousand views is $3, which allows large sites to earn up to $10 thousand per month on advertising.