Piracy: Study shows 99 per cent of online ads on pirate sites are ‘high-risk’

A study of the thousands of pages from illegal pirate websites has shown 99 per cent of ads being targeted at Australians were unsafe and broadly fell into the “high-risk” categories of malware, pornography and scam websites.

The peer reviewed study conducted by Federation University in Ballarat last year claims to be the first Australian attempt to understand the advertising around illegal websites. Earlier this week Mumbrella revealed many major Australian brands are, mostly inadvertently, pouring millions of dollars into illicit enterprises.

“I’ve looked at Australia and several countries in the Asia-Pacific,” said Paul Watters, professor of information technology. “We often hear about mainstream brands advertising on these sites and my problem with that focus is that it ignores all the other advertising where the scams, sex and so on occur.”

Watters, who is now with the University of Massey in New Zealand, said the study involved physically analysing the top 500 Google-upheld copyrighted complaints for movies and TV distributed by major Hollywood studios and then analysing 10 sites from each complaint sampled for all ads displayed.