White Bullet’s piracy demonetizing programmes drastically reduce ad revenues to piracy websites across Europe, analysis finds

IP protection and cybersafety company White Bullet logged enormous reductions in programmatic advertising to illegal, ad-funded piracy websites across Europe during 2021, according to a new analysis of its demonetisation programmes.

White Bullet works with a range of rights owners, media companies and ad partners to stop ads flowing to piracy websites and apps, and with partners undertakes outreach to brands and ad agencies to raise awareness of their ad supply chain problems.

An enormous 83% of brands significantly reduced ad impressions from landing on websites hosting pirate content after outreach from White Bullet and its client partners. This translates to 5bn blocked ad impressions and nearly US$20m diverted away from piracy websites and moved instead to legitimate publishers.

Peter Szyszko, CEO and Founder of White Bullet, comments:

“Following integration with White Bullet, clients are in a position to reassure advertisers that their advertising campaigns will not appear on piracy websites, which otherwise wastes valuable marketing budget and funds criminals. Additionally, our partners use our data to reach out to brands which fund piracy websites. The data shows this awareness is paying off, with so much advertising diverted instead to legitimate businesses instead of criminals.

“It’s clear that more outreach means more awareness, so we look forward to working with more stakeholders,”

“Greater awareness leads to increased uptake of blocking tools and, ultimately, more pirate ad-blocking means more money for legitimate media distributors. With our growing team and our market-leading technologies, we are committed to continuing to help brands, advertisers, regulators and rights owners in the ongoing fight against online piracy in 2022 and beyond. Our mission is a cleaner, safer, higher-performing media ecosystem and we will continue to play a key role in the ongoing global fight against piracy.”

Leading brands, agencies and advertisers are increasingly aware of the need for collaboration and innovative, technology-driven solutions to tackle the scourge of piracy, says Szyszko. Consequently, White Bullet expanded its team earlier this year with the appointment of a number of additional anti-piracy and brand safety experts. This investment follows increased demand for its services globally as it continues to tackle advertising-funded digital piracy.

White Bullet’s platform detects piracy across multiple digital ecosystems, tracking the all-important financial impact of misdirected advertising with the help of AI and machine learning. Its Intellectual Property Infringement Platform (IPIP) helps to take the profit out of intellectual property crime: it looks for IP-infringing content, examines each infringement’s context, and determines structural violation on a commercial scale – providing accurate piracy risk scores based on this analysis.

IPIP connects rights owners and the advertising industry with real-time risk data, and has prevented millions of pounds of ad spend from funding criminal activity through collaboration with brands, advertisers, regulators and rights owners.