The Effects of Piracy

I just completed a 13 month study of the effects of piracy on my sales.

Along with tracking PDF sales via a variety of sources, this study also consisted of 15 to 30 minutes spent daily searching for my products on P2P networks, usenet, and two IRC channels well known for pirated RPG products. It also consists of monthly daylong efforts to track down unique sources of piracy I won't go into the precise details of the numbers crunching.

My conclusions:
1.) Typically I have found that for each legitimate sale, there are roughly 7.8 uniquely identifiable sources pirating the products (in other words, 780 unique sources to get a pirate copy for every 100 sales).

2.) After establishing the average sales for each product over a 13 month period I have noticed the following trends:

a.) nonpirated items run actual sales 35% below average, with periodic massive sales spikes measuring as a sales increase of several hundred percent.

b.) pirated items typically run in sales 10% to 40% above average prior to piracy, but drop drastically, to run 40% to 70% below average immediately after piracy begins, suggesting a fast saturation of the pirating community.

c.) sales of pirated items begin climbing again 6-7 months after the piracy begins, suggesting a saturation point amongst those who know how and where to pirate goods online. However, the climbing sales still remain 10% to 25% below the overall average.

Just thought I'd let everyone know this interesting facts.

This post has been edited between babysitting hassles.

No offense, but to a certain extent, you'd have to release a lot of numbers and even more info, to back up your conclusions credibly. Or call them "facts".

For instance, was the pirate to sales ratio constant? Like if you sold 50 copies, and there were 400 pirates, then on a another product, you sold 300 copies, and had 2400 pirates. Or just how was the ratio determined.

And on sales data, you'd have to include how you promoted things, reviews, flame wars on websites, etc. Things don't exist in a vacuum. And not just your products, the release of other companies' product. AFAIK, you sell gun books. Surely the 2 d20 Modern print gun books hurt sales, especially the WOTC one. And of course, certain periods of the year are better in terms of free cash - people tend to have more in the spring, due to tax returns, but less in December, due to the holiday season.

And the nature of your products probably alters things. I'm sure something on pistols is more interesting than a pdf on muskets of the French-Indian war. Pirates probably will take anything for free, while very few people would buy odd stuff.

I briefly tried my hand at shareware programs. Junk mostly, and some cheat programs/save editors for games. I found that people really really liked free stuff, but rarely wanted to pay anything for them. So even though it's a completely different context, I am skepitical that piracy hurts sales much - people who buy things will buy them anyway, people who won't, won't.

trancejeremy said:

For instance, was the pirate to sales ratio constant? Like if you sold 50 copies, and there were 400 pirates, then on a another product, you sold 300 copies, and had 2400 pirates. Or just how was the ratio determined.

Click to expand...

The ratio was determined by dividing the number of unique sources by the number of sales. While the numbers were not of a consistent ratio, the ratio has actually increased since the first incident of piracy was documented.

trancejeremy said:

And on sales data, you'd have to include how you promoted things, reviews, flame wars on websites, etc. Things don't exist in a vacuum. And not just your products, the release of other companies' product. AFAIK, you sell gun books. Surely the 2 d20 Modern print gun books hurt sales, especially the WOTC one. And of course, certain periods of the year are better in terms of free cash - people tend to have more in the spring, due to tax returns, but less in December, due to the holiday season.

Click to expand...

Actually, neither of those book has had any influence on sales. UMF D20 preceeded my product line and WL got burned by pitiful editing and glaring mistakes other gun buffs have pointed out. By the time WL was released by WotC, my products also had gained a solid reputation for accuracy as well. The annual fluctuations in sales were accounted for in my study. Incidentally, those traditional fluctuations borne by the print market are almost negligible in my PDF sales records, the exception being the post-Gencon month where I experienced a 75% drop in sales across the board. Promotional efforts have also been minimal, as have been the reviews and flame wars.

trancejeremy said:

And the nature of your products probably alters things. I'm sure something on pistols is more interesting than a pdf on muskets of the French-Indian war. Pirates probably will take anything for free, while very few people would buy odd stuff.

Click to expand...

This is true, though you need to remember that a lack of interest is typically reflected consistently throughout all the sales. Yes, I did a volume on european military rifles from 1870-1900, and the sales are consistently depressed in the same patterns as the more popular volumes (high first month, a significant drop the second month to the tune of around 50%, levels out at that relative point level until piracy occurs and the next drop occurs, the pattern appeared with everything that was pirated).