Copyright Protection Company Offers Piracy Websites an Ad Revenue Sharing Deal
Published on March 4, 2019
- Pirating websites can now make an ad revenue with the support of content creators, and share the money with them.
- A company that represents and protect creators has launched an affiliate program for everyone to benefit from.
- This is a novel approach that goes to the opposite direction of what was the case so far in this field.
“DMCAForce”, a company that protects authors, musicians, publishers, filmmakers, and all kinds of copyright owners, is now offering advertising deals to pirating websites. This is going against the standard practice of rights-holders and their representatives, who are actively trying to close the tap of money supply towards this type of websites. DMCAForce has probably thought that trying to kill piracy or even contain it can never be achieved at the ultimate level, so sharing whatever revenue these domains can generate through advertising would be a way to benefit from their presence anyway.
Large pirate sites enjoy colossal popularity and count many millions of unique visitors each day. DMCAForce sees them as an ideal platform to set up advertising campaigns and promote the stolen content through legitimate channels. So, for example, a person searches and locates a torrent for a movie that they want to watch on one of these websites, and an advertisement pops up, pointing the user to a legitimate source for this title. Although the stolen content may still be retrieved through P2P, an option to get the same material from a lawful source. Some will do so, others will keep off from the offered option, but everyone has to gain from the whole process.
According to DMCAForce, they have already made similar deals in the adult space, winning as much as $15000 per month, where previously they were getting nothing out of these websites. This model has encouraged content creators and copyright holders to allow pirating domains to keep their content up instead of forcing them to take it down, as the flow of ad revenue to their direction is significant and forms the basis for a new business model. This model is bringing some of the pirating traffic ad revenue back to the creator, so not only the damage from piracy is contained, but it somewhat stops being considered damage entirely.
As DMCAForce representatives told TorrentFreak recently: “In the case of direct products, we can provide you affiliate tracking links, where instead of REMOVING the content, you can KEEP the content up, and we direct that user together back to the product on a commission basis. If you have a product you are selling, and want to ask these pirate sites to put advertising around your stolen content or replace the stolen content with linkbacks, we offer that as well. This has encouraged content creators to keep their content up and build a better relationship.”
This certainly sounds as something largely counterintuitive, but it works, and creators seem to like the idea, at least according to DMCAForce. It’s not that rightsholders are joining or embracing piracy, it’s just that they have started figuring out ways to live with it in a way that makes business sense, instead of playing a never-ending “whack-a-mole” game.
Do you find this approach clever, or do you think it’s a short-lived effort? Let us know of your opinion in the comments section below. Also, don’t forget to check our socials, on Facebook and Twitter, where more news and stories are posted every day.