Piracy 'Warnings' Fail To Boost Box Office Revenues, Research Says (torrentfreak.com)

A new academic study shows that graduated response policies against file-sharers fail to boost box office revenues. From a TorrentFreak report: The empirical research, which looked at the effects in various countries including the United States, suggests that these anti-piracy measures are not as effective as the movie studios had hoped. [...] Thus far there has been very little research on the topic but a new study, published by Dr. Jordi McKenzie of Sydney's Macquarie University, suggests that these "strikes" policies don't boost box office revenues. For his paper, published in the most recent issue of the journal 'Information Economics and Policy,' McKenzie looked at opening week and total box office revenues for 6,083 unique films released between 2005 and 2013. Using a variety of statistical analyses, he then measured the impact of the graduated response systems and related policies in six countries. In addition, another ten countries were included as a control measure. The overall conclusion based on thousands of data points is that these anti-piracy policies have no significant impact on box-office income.

Comments

Meanwhile....

[H3lldr0p]

Hollywood is enjoying a streak of box office highs for the past several years.

In short, "piracy" isn't touching their bottom line. If anything, the ability to share these movies and the associated emotions has increased it.

Word of mouth as the best form of advertisement. Who wouldda thunk it?

Makes sense.

[jellomizer]

If you are going to the movies. It is often because.
1. You are excited to see it and really do not want to wait for it.
2. You would want to see it in a large screen, quality speakers, perhaps 3d.
3. You want a reason to leave your home, and perhaps with other people.

If you are excited to see the movie. There isn't any real rush to pirate it. This no rush means it may be available at higher quality vs legit streaming channels, or DVD/Blueray rentals (say from RedBox) for a few bucks.

Re:Makes sense.

[DickBreath]

If you go to the theater to see a movie it is because you REALLY want to see it. So badly that you are willing to endure the movie magic experience of the theater.

Screaming kids, people getting up and squeezing out through the row of seats, and then back again later, and cell phones, and people talking, and telling their life story, along with narrating the film, people kicking the back of your seat, throwing popcorn . . .

It's all part of the movie magic! The theater experience. You wouldn't want to get less than you paid for.

And let's not forget being treated like a criminal before admission into the dignity of the theater experience. And 45 minutes of ads.

Re:News Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

This is so massively critical I don't think Sports and Movies people realize it. I think a study showed once that chronic pirates actually spend more at the movies. Why? Because they are addicted to watching movies (now). Kill the addiction by making it too expensive and inconvenient and then that person may turn to video games, TV, other hobbies, internet trolling, music, etc. Why do you think drug dealers, and even many legitimate businesses give away the first few doses? Simple: humans are creatures of habit. We like the known and we like to repeat the known.

I noticed when I dropped cable two things happened:
1) I stopped watching sports as much - I would only watch the "big games" at a bar or friends house
2) Lack of watching sports made me buy fewer tickets to the games

Results:
- #1 & #2 combined over a couple years resulted in me losing interest, skipping even big games and not buying tickets to any games

- Now I haven't spent even $1 on sports in over a year and don't feel any urge to do so (I went from full cable package + season tickets to ZERO)

- This would have been entirely avoided by the sports team if I didn't have to pay so much for cable sports

Mostly not even worth free

[SuperKendall]

The thing about Hollywood movies is, more and more I can't even be bothered to watch most of them when they are free, never mind the trouble of going to the theater or wasting bandwidth downloading them...

The theaters have done what they can with things like having theaters that have assigned seats and comfortable roomy chairs. But it doesn't matter how great the room is, if the movie stinks why would I go?

I don't know what it would take for movie studios to start producing interesting and original work again. Maybe they should ask Netflix how it's done...

Re:What warnings?

[SharpFang]

Specifically, they don't need to wait through that unskippable crap. Only legal customers are actually penalized.

It has some negative impact, at the leasy.

[Thanatiel]

These stupid warnings ended up pissing me off so much I simply stopped buying disks.
For a while I switched to a well know ads-free streaming platform, until they banned VPN.
Since I simply browse the web, read books or play games.

They should not underestimate how much customers despise being interrupted with stupid insulting warnings (or worse : anti-piracy videos)

What genius didn't realise the pirates will not be the ones seeing these annoying messages ?