15.5% of German Internet surfers use illegal content
The FFA has presented the Study on the use of websites with media-related content, carried out by the Media Efficiency Panel of consultancy firm GfK. The analysis reveals worrying figures regarding illegal content on the web: 16.1m users accessed web pages with illegal content linked to the cultural industries (films, video-games, electronic books, music, etc.), of which 7.3m (15.5% of the online population) carried out downloads or streaming.
To carry out the study, a sample of 15,000 German households was used, analysing the habits of individual Internet users aged over six years during the first half of 2011. The scope of the study, the so-called “online population”, is made up of 47.2m people, of which almost 60% used some type of content related to the cultural industries within the said period. Of these, 22.2m (47.1% of the online population) accessed illegal content and/or adult content (16.1m illegal content and 14.1m adult content). 34.1% of the Internet surfers occasionally used web pages with cultural content that contained film and audiovisual material offered legally.
The analysis focuses on the users and online supply and not on the business of the cultural industries on the Internet, providing figures for the legal and illegal market that are difficult to compare with each other given that they look at different parameters (the film sector for the first, the cultural industry sector for the second). Therefore, its results do not enable an accurate assessment of the economic impact of the illegal market on the industry. Nevertheless, the study gives a good picture of the audience in one of the most wide-reaching media for the film industry.
(Translated from Spanish)
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