14 DAY TRIAL // Many fingers point towards YouTube and blame the company for hurting legal sales by allowing some content to be hosted on the platform. The reality, however, may be quite different, as a study commissioned by the company shows that YouTube actually steers people away from pirate sites.
YouTube is by far the most popular video-watching platform in the world. In fact, the company casually announced back in February that viewers watch over 1 billion hours of videos every day.
But this status makes a lot of people, mostly copyright holders, quite unhappy. The site is being accused of being a DMCA-protected piracy haven, exploiting legal loopholes for profit.
YouTube doesn't agree with this and has commissioned a study from RBB Economics to see what impact the service has on the music industry.
What would you do if YouTube was no more? Pirate!
The study took into consideration exclusive YouTube data and surveyed 6,000 users from the UK, Italy, France, and Germany. One of the questions they asked was whether YouTube was keeping them away from pirate music sites.
"If YouTube didn't exist, 85% of time spent on YouTube would move to lower value channels, and would result in a significant increase in piracy," writes YouTube's Simon Morrison.
The study further indicates that if YouTube vanished overnight, half of all the time spent on there on music would be "lost," switching to pirate sites and services. Time spent listening to pirated content would increase by 29%. Basically, YouTube is a substitute for pirate content.
Only about 15% of the total number of users would switch to a higher value service if YouTube weren't available. That's an extremely small number of people who would choose to pay for a streaming service if the video platform weren't available.
As TorrentFreak points out, with as much criticism as the music industry directs at YouTube, you'd think they really are more than willing to accept a hike in piracy than get the money YouTube does pay them for views, which is about $1 billion.