Threatening messages aimed to prevent digital piracy have the opposite effect if you're a man, a new study from the University of Portsmouth has found. According to the research, women tend to respond positively to this kind of messaging, but men typically increase their piracy behaviors by 18%.
The conclusion doesn’t follow the study.
Threatening messages decrease piracy by women by over 50%, while increasing piracy by men by 18%.
So, unless there are three times as many male pirates as female, those messages are effective at reducing piracy.
I would suspect there are many times more male pirates than female.
Why?
Because of the technical skill required for pirating and the tech industry being mostly men currently.
My wife set up an ARR stack, because she didn’t like downloading individual episodes. It’s not that hard.
The point is that your wife is in the minority. The vast majority of people wouldn’t consider torrenting, let alone *arrs. People with a greater willingness to tinker and learn technical stuff are the ones who’ll consider it, and that group is overwhelmingly composed of men as of right now.
I’m seeing 3:1 male female from this source, but I figure data collection on torrent users is tricky: https://marketsplash.com/torrent-statistics/
Anecdotally, that makes sense. If you were to look at piracy overall, however, I wouldn’t be surprised if that ratio was closer to 50/50.
Result of gender stereotypes affecting the behaviour of female and male children, so male children grow up to be more encouraged to learn about technology and engage in risk taking behaviour.
Also inclination to risk taking behaviour is much higher in biological men than biological women, which would also give a potential reason why this advertisment works on women but not on men.
As always these attributions only represent the average of the women and men populations as a whole. Ofc. there is risk averse men and tech savvy women.
The word cis or cisgender is right there my friend. Trans people are still biological, after all.
That would not surprise me at all.
If I put the over/under at 10x male pirate to female, are you taking the under?
Bittorrent is also only a portion of pirating, but that’s showing 3:1 globally, https://marketsplash.com/torrent-statistics/
Complete garbage website. Tons of conflicting info, suppositions, and when you bother to look at the sources, their claims quickly fall apart. For example,
-9. “Average Teenager’s iPod Has 800 Illegal Music Tracks” by The Times - written June 2008
I agree, but I haven’t been able to find a lot of good studies past about 2005; and a lot has changed since then.
46% of pirates in the UK were women in 2018.
Based on what data?
University of Amsterdam Institute for Information Law, indirectly sourced from here: https://dataprot.net/statistics/piracy-statistics/
I guess we’ll just have to take their word for it since they don’t actually link to anything or provide the data. In fact, that whole statement doesn’t even appear to be attributed to the University of Amsterdam. It appears the preceding statement about 25-34 year olds pirating is what’s attributed to the university.
Don’t have time to read the research paper linked by the article at the moment…
But isn’t the research just looking at how people view the message and not “were you pirating stuff and now you’re not?”