The most pirated content on the internet is no longer movies

In the field of online piracy, 2024 was a turning point: the most affected area is no longer that of films and TV series, but publishing, primarily due to a significant increase in illegal manga downloads. According to data from the research firm Muso, cited by the U.S. magazine Variety, the number of accesses to piracy websites dedicated to manga has shown strong growth over the years, with a 347% increase between 2019 and 2024. In just the past year, views in the “publishing” category on pirate sites saw an increase of over 50 percentage points, rising from 16.5 billion in the first quarter of 2024 to 25.7 billion in the last. This jump is particularly unusual, far above typical seasonal variations. The increase is significantly greater than that of TV piracy.

The reasons behind this trend are to be found in the increasing difficulty of legal access to manga. On the one hand, the sector has experienced global expansion thanks to online communities, but on the other, many readers face daily obstacles such as low availability in physical stores, high costs of digital platforms, or the lack of official translations in certain languages. This drives many fans to rely on so-called “scanlation,” i.e. entirely amateur translations made by fans and distributed online, often ahead of official releases. A spokesperson for Muso also highlighted the relevance of this issue, explaining that «although legal manga platforms have grown, many still struggle with simultaneous releases in different countries, pricing strategies adopted by distributors, and the actual availability of individual manga.» Pirate sites, therefore, fill this gap by offering translations in multiple languages – easily accessible to all.

The success of manga in the legal market only highlights the potential audience that could be reached. According to estimates from U.S. market analysis firm Dimension Market Research, the sector reached a value of about 15 billion dollars in 2024, with a forecasted growth to almost 70 billion by 2033. At the same time, however, piracy is causing significant economic damage to this area: a study commissioned by the Japanese government, for example, calculated that the losses due to the illegal spread of manga amounted to about 7 billion dollars in 2024. But the impact of piracy on manga is not a phenomenon limited to Japan. The ten countries with the highest number of illegal views include the United States and Indonesia, followed by Russia, France, and Mexico, which highlights the global scope of the phenomenon. This data also emphasizes how manga has now achieved worldwide success. However, at the same time, it also underscores the urgency of finding solutions to make legal content more accessible on an international scale.

A possible model to address this issue comes from the field of anime: Japanese animated series have always been subject to piracy, so much so that in 2024, eight of the ten most pirated TV programs worldwide were anime. However, the spread of platforms like Crunchyroll – which since 2021 has tripled the number of subscribers – has helped slow this trend, offering fans a legal and more accessible alternative. In this context, even major streaming giants like Netflix and Disney are beginning to invest in the anime sector, offering users an increasingly wide range of content. Making deals with global distribution platforms could be an effective solution for the manga industry as well. Today, in this field, the challenge is twofold: on one hand, to fight piracy with increasingly targeted actions; on the other, to improve the accessibility of content to turn at least some of the illegal downloads into paid ones. Strengthening simultaneous worldwide publication, reducing translation times, and making subscription options more accessible are additional possible strategies to limit the piracy phenomenon: the future of the manga industry will partly depend on this.