Statistics of Online Piracy Rates across the World

Despite the increasing choice of legal options, online piracy remains widespread across the world. Pirate portals are visited hundreds of millions of times every day. According to information collected by a piracy tracking agency MUSO from 14,000 of the largest global piracy sites, there were over 140 billion visits to pirate sites only in 2015. The data accounts visits to both international and local pirate websites, and the agency believes that it’s an accurate overview of the global piracy landscape. Let’s see where these pirates are coming from.

If we talk absolute numbers, the US clearly comes out on top, accounting for about 10bn visits to streaming portals and 3bn to torrent websites. It is not a secret that the US is one of the largest countries in the world with a high Internet penetration, but things get more interesting in terms of the piracy rate based on the number of Internet users across the globe. With this factor into account, a comparison of the top 50 countries with the most piracy traffic highlight the problems in Europe: actually, all of the top 10 countries with the highest piracy rates are in Europe.

The first comes Latvia with almost 50% of the Internet users visiting pirate sites. It is followed by Bulgaria, Lithuania, Croatia, Spain, Greece, Serbia, Ireland, Romania and Sweden. Australia has a piracy rate of 16%, Canada – 11%. In this case, the US is one of the countries with the lowest piracy rates, below 5%.

The United Kingdom has a piracy rate of around 8%, while Germany showed less than 2%. Surprisingly enough, the top 50 is closed by Vietnam with the rate of just over 1%. It will be interesting to see if these rankings change over time.