'Non humans' account for over half of all web traffic

"By one study's measure, slightly more than half of all the Internet's traffic comes from computers not being used by fleshy humans that might actually purchase products.
That's according to study released today by Incapsula, an Internet security firm, begging the question: What exactly does Internet traffic from a "non-human" look like? Incapsula is here to explain: "hackers, spambots, scrapers and spies of sorts collecting proprietary business information and customer data from unsuspecting websites." "Hackers" (5 percent) refers to hacking software that visits site to swipe credit-card information or crash sites (think of the ubiquitous DDoS attacks). "Scrapers" (another 5 percent) refer to bots that copy content from other sites and post it on their own, to get search-engine traffic. Altogether, the robotic ne'er-do-wells cited above constitutes 31 percent of all web traffic. The other 20 percent is the search engines themselves, the Googles and Bings of the Interwebbed world, whose servers work 'round-the-clock to index the Internet for our browsing pleasure."

Source:  Atlantic Wire, 15th March 2012

The impact of film piracy increases the longer the time allowed between US premiere and opening elsewhere

"[A] new study reveals that movie industry itself has the key to decreasing piracy, without passing any news laws.
In a paper titled ‘Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Film Piracy on International Box Office Sales’ researchers from the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College examine the link between BitTorrent piracy and box office returns. As hypothesized, they find that international movie piracy losses are directly linked to the delay between US and foreign premieres.
In other words, the longer it takes before a movie is released internationally, the more box office revenues are impacted through piracy.
“We find that longer release windows are associated with decreased box office returns, even after controlling for film and country fixed effects. This relationship is much stronger in contexts where piracy is more prevalent: after BitTorrent’s adoption and in heavily pirated genres,” they write.
“Our findings indicate that, as a lower bound, international box office returns in our sample were at least 7% lower than they would have been in the absence of pre-release piracy.”"
Source:  TorrentFreak, 10th February 2012

There are estimated to be more than 300 companies in China creating fraudulent app reviews

"An industry insider said recently that there were at least 300 companies in China specializing in submitting fraudulent reviews for applications. The insider said that at a conservative estimate 30% of mobile applications used the services of these companies, and that 70% of applications had boosted their app rankings either using their own staff or the services of these companies. The practice of hiring people to boost app download figures and positive ratings, and to leave negative feedback for competitors' applications, is an open secret in the industry."

Source:  China Business News, via Marbridge Daily, 9th February 2012

The number of people subscribing to legal music streaming services rose by 65% in 2011

"The number of consumers subscribing to legal music streaming services globally increased by nearly 65 per cent in 2011, according to new IFPI estimates.
Paying subscribers of streaming services hit 13.4 million in the year, according to the IFPI’s new Digital Music Report 2012 – up from 8.2 million in 2010.
Spotify reports it has 2.5 million paying subscribers worldwide, including over 400,000 in the US market since its launch there in July - and that it sees its expansion in the US as a springboard to international markets.
Ken Parks, chief content officer, says: “We were very focused on how Spotify, which had been a European service, would translate to the US. Now, having seen the acceptance in the biggest music market, it gives us a huge degree of confidence and optimism to expand elsewhere.”
Subscription streaming services have caught on "exceptionally well" in certain markets, says the report, particularly in Scandinavia.
In Sweden, says the report, subscription accounted for 84 per cent of digital revenues in the first 11 months of 2011, boosted by its national champion Spotify. Other markets saw sharp growth in subscription revenues, including France which saw an increase of more than 90 per cent in the first 11 months of 2011 (SNEP)."
Source:  Data from the IFPI's Digital Music Report 2012, reported by Music Week, 23rd January 2012
See the full report here

The story Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was an early victim of piracy

"Stephenson's novella was first published by Longmans, Green in January of 1886 and sold 40,000 copies in 6 months in Britain, and an estimated 250,000 pirated copies in the United States"
Source:  Robert Louis Stephenson, by Frank McLynn, 1993, page 263

Music piracy has fallen in Sweden as a result of streaming services like Spotify

"Copyright and download blog TorrentFreak says that the latest quarterly report from Media Vision (in Swedish) prepared for the industry association Musiksverige (Music Sweden) shows a 25% fall in piracy in the country since 2009.
Streaming services such as Spotify are now the most popular way to consume music. More than 40 percent of the participants in the survey now use a music streaming service, compared to less than 10 percent who say they download music legally. About 23 percent continue to pirate music, but this number is dwindling.
The report also examines why listeners say they are moving away from pirate downloads:
Looking at the motivations for people to switch to legal services, participants in the survey cited “the range of music that’s released” as the primary reason (40%). Other explanations were the absolute increase in available music (30%), and the fact that legal services have become cheaper (24%) and simpler (24%)."
Source:  Wall Street Journal blog, 30th September 2011

68% of companies monitor employee internet activity

"Clearswift, the software security company, today unveiled the latest edition of its annual research report, WorkLifeWeb 2011, outlining global attitudes towards social media and personal technology in today’s workplace. This year’s research has highlighted a new phase in the social media journey as businesses across the globe clamp down following recent high profile data breaches: 68% of companies now monitor employee internet activity and 56% block access to some sites.
An overwhelming sense of caution is emanating from businesses when it comes to social media. In Clearswift’s 2010 study just 9% of companies globally engaged in blocking employee access to social media sites, yet in the latest research this figure has risen to 19%. Blocking is most evident in Germany (23%) and Australia (21%). The only exception is the United States, with 30% of companies actively encouraging their employees to use social media tools.
In addition, 87% of companies in the survey are so concerned about security and data loss that it’s preventing technology adoption; this fear is most evident in Japan (92%). However, managers still see social media as being critical to future success, particularly in relation to communication, with 54% citing web collaboration as a pivotal tool, and one in four companies planning to invest more in social media this year than last. The push for investment is strongest in the United States, where 44% expect to invest, and the UK, where 31% expect to do so. It is weakest in Germany (18%) and Japan (13%)."
Source:  Data from Clearswift, reported in a press release, 6th September 2011

Global recorded music sales fell by almost $1.5bn in 2010

"Global recorded music sales fell by almost $1.5bn (£930m) last year as digital piracy continued to take its toll on the industry, with the UK losing its mantle as the third-largest music market after "physical" sales of CDs collapsed by almost a fifth.
Global recorded music revenues fell 8.4% last year, about $1.45bn, to $15.9bn according to the annual Recording Industry in Numbers report by international music industry body the IFPI.
Overall physical sales, the term used in the industry for sales of products such as CDs, fell by 14.2% year on year to $10.4bn.
Digital revenues grew by 5.3% year on year to $4.6bn to account for 29% of all recorded music revenues. However, the rate of digital revenue growth has halved year on year as the industry continues to struggle with piracy and winning consumers over to legal download models.
The world's two largest markets, the US and Japan, took a hammering last year accounting for 57% of the total global decline in trade revenues. In 2009 the two countries accounted for 80% of the global decline.
In the US overall sales fell by 10% with physical sales down 20% to just over $2bn and digital sales stagnating with 1.2% growth to $2bn. Japan saw an overall market decline of 8.3% with the report noting that "rapidly rising online is threatening the development of the digital market"."
Source:  Data from IFPI, reported by The Guardian, 28th March 2011

Collectively, porn and other films make up 71% of illegally shared files

Click to enlarge

"Envisional’s researchers looked through the 10,000 most popular files being managed by the PublicBT BitTorrent tracker and broke it down by type. Pornography was, err, on top, with films coming next in popularity. Music sits way down the list.
The percentage obviously depends on just where you place your cutoff. The Pirate Bay’s overall top 100, for instance, has 10 recent albums in its list (the rest is almost exclusively video content). Still, the disparity in the numbers are eye-popping; pirates want movies more than music, and by a significant margin."
Source:  Research by Envisional & NBC Universal, reported by Wired, 3rd February 2011
Full study (pdf) here

Almost three times as many people watch music videos online as legally download music

"The most popular form of music consumption polled by Nielsen was the “watch” habit: 57% have watched music videos on computers in the last three months. Sites like YouTube are a mainstream channel. Just behind “watch” in global popularity comes the traditional area of concern of the music industry - consumers downloading a song from the internet without paying for it. Many of the online consumers who have been surveyed declare having undertaken this activity: nearly 50% of the global online population in the last three months, although this number varies greatly from region to region: being highest in Asia-Pacific, Latin America and Middle East / Africa, and far less in Europe and the US.
However, it is key to keep in mind that these figures do not reflect the volume of downloads nor that this activity is necessarily illegal, as free legal digital downloads can be obtained.
Other learnings from our survey show the growing importance of IT and telecom devices, whether used for music streaming on a computer (26%), streaming music on a mobile phone (21%), watching music video on mobile phones (23%) and downloading or using music apps (20%)."
Source:  Digital music consumption and digital music access, Nielsen Music, for Midem, 12th January 2011

Methodology:  "This analysis is based on a survey conducted by Nielsen (survey of 26,644 online consumers in 53 markets across the globe during September 2010). The broad set of questions covered  music purchasing and listening habits."

BitTorrent has over 100m monthly users

"BitTorrent, Inc., an innovator of advanced technologies to efficiently move large files across the Internet, today announced a key milestone, growing to over 100m worldwide monthly users of its two software products--the original BitTorrent Mainline, and the iconic µTorrent.
"This is an exciting day for our team. Our vision is to build a complete technology ecosystem comprised of software, content and devices, designed to connect modern content creators with a massive digital audience," said Eric Klinker, CEO at BitTorrent. "This milestone highlights the size of our user base and the power of our software."
Additional user statistics:
Average daily active users: Over 20 million
Average daily client downloads: Over 400,000
52 languages (including English)
Clients checking in from over 220 countries every day"

Source:  Press release from BitTorrent, 3rd January 2011

Piracy in Spain cost rights holders €2.5bn in the first half of 2010

"Piracy in Spain cost legal content rights owners 5.2 billion euros in the first half of 2010, more than triple the 1.56 billion euros in revenue earned by the digital content industry in the same period, according to a report released Wednesday.
According to Observation of Piracy and Consumption of Digital Content Habits study, conducted by IDC Research for the Madrid-based Coalition of Content Creators and Industries, the music sector was the hardest hit, with 97.8% of consumption derived from illegal downloads -- estimated at some 2.7 billion euros.
Some 77% of movie downloads, worth 1.87 billion euros, were done illegally, while video games same illegal downloads grow from 52.3% from the second half of 2009 to 60.7% in the first six months of 2010. The study concluded that piracy cost the gaming sector some 262 million euros."
Source:  Research by IDC, reported by The Hollywood Reporter, 3rd November 2010

It takes the average person 14 seconds to solve a CAPTCHA, with a 10% error rate

"According to a study recently conducted by UC San Diego researchers, spammers employ many hundreds of people, mostly overseas, to solve CAPTCHAs at the rate of about one dollar per thousand solutions. It takes the average person 14 seconds to solve a CAPTCHA, and the human error rate is ten percent. There are 3600 seconds in an hour, which means roughly 231 solutions per hour per person [(3600/14)(.9)], which means that the foot soldiers of the CAPTCHA-solving army get paid less than 25 cents an hour."
Source:  Data from UC San Diego researchers, reported by GeekOSystem, 13th August 2010
PDF of the full study here

The RIAA warns over 1 million copyright infringers each year

"In less than two years the RIAA [Recording Industry Association of America] has sent copyright infringement notices to 1.8 million Internet subscribers and 269,609 to colleges and universities. Despite this staggering average of more than a million infringement notices every year from the recording industry alone, the effect on file-sharing levels seems unnoticeable.
For years, content owners such as record labels and movie studios have been sending copyright infringement notices to Internet users. They hire companies such as DtecNet and BayTSP, who monitor file-sharing networks and automatically send infringement notices to Internet providers. The Internet providers on their turn are legally obliged to forward these to their customers."
Source: TorrentFreak, 4th July 2010

The final two episodes of Lost were downloaded more than 900,000 times from BitTorrent in the first 20 hours

"Last year, Lost achieved the questionable honor of being the second most-pirated TV-show on BitTorrent. With more than 6 million downloads for a single episode, Lost was only trailing Heroes by a few thousand downloads.
There is no doubt that the final season of the show will again be a strong contender in 2010’s list. On average, an episode of Lost is downloaded nearly 1.5 million times in the first week after its appearance on BitTorrent, but there is an overwhelming demand for the series finale which aired on Sunday.
In the first 20 hours after they appeared on BitTorrent, the final two episodes were downloaded a little over 900,000 times, an amount expected to increase to four or five million by the and of the week. As far as we know, this is a new download record for BitTorrent in such a short time frame."
Source: TorrentFreak, 25th May 2010

Fewer than 20% of the Top 100 videos on YouTube are user generated content

Source: Data from TubeMogul, reported by AllThingsDigital, 17th February 2010
There's a version of the data as a bar chart here
Note - the reason that they are strange percentages, rather than whole numbers, is that they look at a rolling list of the Top 100s over time. E.g. it might be 18 ugc videos one day, and 16 another day.

A census of files available via BitTorrent

"File types
46% movies and shows (non-pornographic)
14% games and software
14% pornography
10% music
1% books and guides
1% images
14% could not classify"

99% of material infringed copyright:
"Overall, we classified ten of the 1021 files, or approximately 1%, as likely non-infringing, This result should be interpreted with caution, as we may have missed some non-infringing files, and our sample is of files available, not files actually downloaded. Still, the result suggests strongly that copyright infringement is widespread among BitTorrent users."
Source: Assessment of 1021 files avaiable on BitTorrent by Sauhard Sahi, a Princeton senior, reported by the Freedom to Tinker blog, 29th January 2010

Piracy has led to a decline in the local music releases in France, Spain and Brazil

"In France, there has been a striking fall in the number of local repertoire albums released in recent years. In the first half of 2009, 107 Frenchrepertoire albums were released, 60 per cent down on the 271 in the same period of 2003. French artist signings have also slumped by 60 per cent, from 91 in the first half of 2002 to 35 in the same period of 2009. Overall investment in marketing and promotion by the French music industry fell nine per cent in the first six months of 2009. It is estimated that 25 per cent of the French internet population currently download music illegally from P2P networks or other sources on a monthly basis (Jupiter Research, 2009).
In Spain, a culture of state-tolerated apathy towards illegal file-sharing has contributed to a dramatic slump in the music market. Spain has the worst online piracy problem of any major market in Europe. Today, P2P usage in Spain, at 32 per cent of internet users, is more than double the European rate of 15 per cent (Jupiter Research, 2009). The Spanish legitimate music market is now only one third of its size in 2001 and fell by around 17 per cent in 2009 alone. Local artist album sales in the Top 50 declined by 65 per cent between 2004 and 2009.
In Brazil, music sales fell by more than 40 per cent between 2005 and 2009, with a disastrous impact on investment in local repertoire. In 2008 there were only 67 full priced local artist album releases by the five biggest music companies in Brazil – just one tenth of the number (625) a decade earlier. This has been particularly damaging in a market where 70 per cent of music consumed is domestic repertoire."
[The report says that these are just illustrative markets, not the only markets where this effect has been seen]
Source: Page 19 of IFPI Digital Music Report 2010

Digital music - 2003 vs 2009

Click to enlarge

Source: Page 6 of IFPI Digital Music Report 2010

Online book piracy represents roughly 10% of total United States book sales

"Attributor’s FairShare Guardian™ service discovered that over 9 million pirated book copies were downloaded in a recent study of ~1,000 books of various genres.
These free downloads represent potential losses of $2.75-3 billion to the book publishing industry.
Online book piracy represents roughly 10% of total United States book sales.12
On average, nearly 10,000 copies of every book published are downloaded for free, led by titles in the Business and Investing genre, which average over 13,000 free downloads per title.
Titles within the Business and Investing, Professional and Technical and Science categories are potentially losing over $1 million per title to online book piracy."
Source: US Book Anti-Piracy Research Finding, Attributor Corporation, 14th January 2010