What 216 billion pirate site visits mean for media companies
Piracy tracking firm MUSO counted 216 billion visits to piracy sites in 2024. That is down 5.7 percent from 229 billion the year before, and it still means piracy sites get more annual traffic than most legitimate media platforms will ever see. For anyone who owns content, the interesting part is not the headline number. It is where the traffic goes and how it shifts.
TV carries the biggest share
Television content drew 44.6 percent of all piracy visits in 2024, by far the largest category in MUSO's data. Film fell 18 percent and music fell 19 percent, which tracks with cheap legal access through streaming subscriptions. The outlier is publishing: up 4.3 percent to 66.4 billion visits, with manga alone accounting for over 70 percent of that category. Wherever legal access is fragmented or delayed, piracy fills the gap.
Where the traffic comes from
The United States leads with 26.7 billion visits, roughly 12 percent of global piracy traffic, followed by India with 17.6 billion. Russia, Indonesia and Vietnam complete the top five. High-income markets with broad legal offers still produce enormous piracy volumes, so availability alone does not solve the problem.
The EU's IP office reached a similar conclusion in its long-running infringement studies: EU internet users averaged nearly ten visits to pirate services per month in earlier measurement periods, with streaming making up about three quarters of all access. Attitudes toward piracy, price levels and legal availability all shape how much gets pirated in a given market.
Why visits understate the problem
MUSO itself notes that website visits are only part of the picture, because IPTV piracy runs outside normal web measurement. For live content the gap is worse. A pirated film costs one lost rental. A pirated live stream costs subscription revenue, advertising reach and broadcast license value at the same time, and it loses almost all value within hours of the event. Enforcement that takes days is enforcement that failed.
What this means operationally
Three practical conclusions follow from the data. Detection has to run continuously, because 216 billion visits do not come from a fixed list of sites you can block once. Response time decides the damage, especially for live content, where takedowns compete with the broadcast clock. And search visibility matters as much as the file itself, because most of that traffic starts with a search or a link that enforcement can reach.
This is the operating model behind our anti-piracy work: our systems have removed more than 15 million infringing links so far, and the number on our homepage updates as it grows. For media companies that want to see the approach against their own catalog, the 30-minute walkthrough on our solutions page uses live findings instead of slides.
Piracy in 2024 shrank slightly and shifted visibly. The categories that grew are the ones where legal access lags. For rights holders the takeaway is unglamorous: measure constantly, respond fast, and treat search results as part of the battlefield.
