Follow The Money: Online Piracy and Self-Regulation in the Advertising Industry

Michail Batikas, Jörg Claussen and Christian Peukert (christian.peukert@unil.ch)

No 6852, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: In this paper, we study the effects of a self-regulatory effort, orchestrated by the European Commission, that aims to reduce advertising revenues for publishers of copyright infringing content. Historical data lets us follow how the third-party advertising and tracking services associated with a large number of piracy websites and a corresponding set of legitimate “placebo” websites change after the agreement to self-regulate went in place. We find that larger EU-based advertisers comply with the initiative and reduce their connections with piracy websites. We do not find reductions for other non-advertising services that track consumers, which has potentially important implications for the efficiency of targeted advertising.

Keywords: piracy; copyright enforcement; online advertising; natural experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K40 L50 L80 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-ict, nep-ipr, nep-law, nep-mkt and nep-pay
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Follow the money: Online piracy and self-regulation in the advertising industry (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_6852

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