Spain is reducing its piracy levels, even if it is little by little. Compared to 2018, the drop in consumption of pirated content has been 11%. In the past year 2022, the decrease compared to 2021 was not notable, given that it was only 2.5% less. However, it is positive to see that the numbers continue to dropeven if it is little by little.
Football in the spotlight
The person responsible for the report is the GfK agency, which, once again, returns to the fray with the analysis of the piracy situation among Spaniards and discovers that, in 2022, 5,268 million illegal content. This figure adds up to both illegal downloads and unauthorized online viewing, something that especially affects the world of sports.
The data related to football indicates that the volume of piracy was, last year, 20%. Yes it is true that there was a decrease compared to the previous year, but this was only 1%. In comparison, other sectors have enjoyed a greater reduction in piracy, such as video games, a market that stands at only 15%.
Millionaires loses
Within this same report it is indicated that the country lost 551 million in unapplied VAT, Social Security and Personal Income Tax due to access to pirated content, while private companies lost 1,995 million euros. In addition to the economic losses, special emphasis is also placed on how the piracy situation in Spain causes a direct impact on jobs that could be created. And, to give more volume to this argument, a specific piece of information is provided: without piracy, more than 80,000 jobs would have been created.
Although football piracy makes a lot of noise in our country due to how close this sport is to citizens, there are other types of content that have come out even worse. This is the case of piracy of books and newspapers and magazines. In the case of books, it has increased from 34% to 35%, magazines have suffered an increase of 1% and newspapers 3%. These dates They are especially dramatic taking into account how bad things are going for the printed press sector, which continues to see headlines and publications that have been active for years close.
Regarding other sectors, series piracy remains at the same 20% as last year, while film piracy has decreased by only 1%, leaving it at 24% of the total. These two sectors are significant, given that there were predictions that the presence of streaming platforms would help reduce the volume of consumption of pirated content. However, for now this is not the case. The same can be said for football, which with platforms like DAZN one might have thought would enjoy a greater reduction in illegal access.
There are other data from the report that are important, such as that 60% of access to pirated content occurs from Google or that messaging apps, like Telegram, represent 27% of the total. In addition to this, it is discovered that 20% of users connected to the Internet have paid, at least once, for pirated content. The payment method that has been most widespread in this sense has been the one represented by cryptocurrencies.
To solve this data and for piracy to begin to be reduced in Spain at a higher level, the Federation of Editors’ Guilds of Spain says that it is essential to have a better relationship with the companies involved. They complain about how difficult it is, for example, to contact and talk to Google to stop the distribution of pirated content. The same thing happens with Meta, mentioning how it is common for books to circulate in pirated versions on WhatsApp shortly after being published.