Websites exclusively posting pirated movies, music and TV...

Websites exclusively posting pirated movies, music and TV programs made nearly a quarter of a billion dollars last year from advertising, said a Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA) report (http://bit.ly/1f9EnXH). The report looked at 596 “content theft sites” profiting “exclusively from advertising dollars by pushing stolen” materials, such as isohunt.com, filestube.com, allmyvideos.net and 4shared.com, said a release from DCA, which describes itself as a “consumer-oriented coalition” aiming to educate the public and policy makers on the online sale of drugs, the digital pirating of creative content and the existence of online scams. Various industries -- health, pharmaceutical and creative -- financially back DCA, but a DCA spokesman told us the list of companies was private. The organization’s report said the 30 largest content theft sites averaged $4.4 million in 2013 profit, with profit margins of 80 to 94 percent. Thirty percent of the large sites carried ads from “premium” brands such as Google, Microsoft, Lego, Whole Foods and Zappos, the report said. “Ad profits are the tip of the iceberg,” said DCA Executive Director Tom Galvin, who also founded 463 Communications, a public relations company that has worked with companies like Skype and Facebook, in the release. “These ad-supported rip-off websites are just a small sample of the sites that are profiting from theft, and with the Internet population growing so quickly we need to address this problem immediately.” DCA commissioned MediaLink, a marketing and advertising advisory firm, to help with the study, which looked at Q3 2013 as the basis for its yearlong profit projections.