The underground market for pirated video is shrinking financially even as its infrastructure expands. According to F6 estimates, distributors of illegal video earned $16.6 million in the first half of 2025, a 14.5% year-over-year decline and a 26.5% drop versus the same period in 2023. This marks the sixth consecutive year of deteriorating monetization.
Piracy monetization declines as search traffic and visibility fall
F6 links revenue dynamics to three levers: user demand for illegal content, rights holders’ enforcement efficacy, and the advertising economy (CPM—cost per thousand impressions). Search-driven visits to pirate sites fell by 13.9% year over year in H1 2025, consistent with stronger uptake of licensed streaming and reduced visibility of infringing pages due to faster moderation and blocking by platforms and intermediaries.
This aligns with broader market signals: search engines have expanded downranking and delisting of repeat infringers, while rights-holder coalitions such as the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) and court-backed site-blocking programs have accelerated takedowns across multiple jurisdictions. Combined, these measures lower discoverability and raise operational friction for piracy sites.
Advertising yield weakens: CPM continues to drift lower
Advertising revenues on pirate inventory are under pressure. The average CPM on piracy properties in H1 2025 was $3.11, down 0.6% from 2024 and 2.2% from 2023. This reflects tighter brand-safety controls in ad-tech: demand-side platforms and supply-side platforms increasingly integrate anti-piracy blocklists, TAG “Certified Against Piracy” standards, and supply-chain transparency (ads.txt/app-ads.txt), shrinking advertiser access to “gray” inventory and cutting bid density.
Domain arms race: mirrors proliferate as distribution channels narrow
Paradoxically, infrastructure is growing while income falls. In response to faster blocks and deindexing, operators are stockpiling alternate domains: 79,000 domains for new mirrors were registered in H1 2025, a 27.4% year-over-year increase, marking the third straight year of domain growth.
Websites displace social platforms and messengers
Distribution is consolidating onto owned websites. In 2025, direct links to pirate sites account for 98.4% of dissemination, while the share of social networks, messengers, and video hosts has contracted to 1.6%, down from 12.1% in 2023. Public platforms remove infringing content quickly upon notice, whereas operator-controlled sites can pivot between domains, DNS providers, and hosting with minimal lag.
Evasion tactics: faster rotation and traffic masking to extend uptime
Piracy groups are accelerating mirror and domain rotation, distributing assets across registrars and jurisdictions, and employing redirect chains and cloaking to disguise sources of traffic from moderators and automated detection. Techniques such as fast-flux DNS, link shorteners, and bulletproof hosting do not lift revenue, but they extend the lifespan of each replica and increase resilience against targeted disruptions.
Six years of decline: enforcement maturity raises risk and cost
Several long-run forces are compressing margins: advanced content identification (fingerprinting and watermarking), swifter court and extra-judicial blocking, and tighter integration of anti-piracy lists into ad platforms and site-vetting workflows. The result is a higher risk-adjusted cost of monetizing pirated inventory and rising transaction costs to maintain mirror fleets and traffic acquisition.
Demand for illegal content persists—driven in part by fragmented content catalogs and regional availability gaps—but the economics are deteriorating. As F6 notes, the surge in domains reflects a defensive posture: more mirrors are now required merely to maintain prior reach. For rights holders and ad-tech, the most effective path remains systemic: automated crawling and rapid escalation to registrars/hosts, robust content fingerprinting and forensic watermarks, strict brand-safety policies and supply-chain exclusion of pirate domains, and coordination with search engines to reduce mirror visibility. Consistent execution of these practices is already constricting the piracy business model and is poised to further erode its margins.
