Pirate Revenues Decline as Film Descriptions Appear in Morse Code
Distributors of illegal video content are earning less. According to experts at F6, revenues in the first half of 2025 fell 14.5% year over year to $16.6 million, and 26.5% compared with the same period in 2023. At the same time, efforts to block pirate sites drove a 27.4% surge in domain registrations, with nearly 79,000 new addresses created.
This marks the sixth consecutive year of declining piracy revenues. Researchers point to three main drivers: user demand for pirated content, CPM (Cost Per Mille—advertising cost per 1,000 impressions), and the effectiveness of enforcement by rights holders.
Traffic and Advertising Decline
Search traffic to pirate portals dropped 13.9% compared to the first half of last year. Analysts attribute this to two factors: more users shifting to legal streaming platforms and faster, more aggressive blocking of pirate domains.
Ad revenues have also weakened. After holding steady in 2024, payouts resumed their decline. The average CPM in the first half of 2025 fell to $3.11—down 0.6% from the same period in 2024 and 2.2% from 2023.
Domain Registrations Surge
To bypass site blocking, pirate distributors are creating more “mirror” domains. In the first six months of 2025, 79,000 new domains were registered—27.4% more than in 2024. This is the third straight year of growth in pirate domain creation.
The flood of new registrations has also shifted how pirated content is distributed. Direct links to pirate sites now account for 98.4% of traffic, while other channels—social media, messaging apps, and video platforms—have shrunk to just 1.6%, compared with 12.1% in 2023.
New Evasion Tactics
As enforcement intensifies, pirates continue to develop creative methods to evade detection. Researchers highlighted several tactics:
- Link Obfuscation: URLs that once contained clear Latin-script titles now use random characters or third-level domains.
- Imitation Domains: Some new registrations closely mimic the names of a major Russian search engine to appear legitimate.
- Encoded Descriptions: In one case, operators published movie titles and descriptions in Morse code to bypass automated detection.
“Piracy remains firmly established. Demand for illegal content is still strong, especially after foreign streaming platforms exited the market. The growing number of pirate domains is a predictable response to more effective intellectual property protection,” said Stanislav Goncharov, Head of F6’s Digital Risk Protection Department.
