Digging deeper into the #Furious7 movie piracy numbers!

It was late Tuesday evening and I had one foot out the door to go dance the night way to some bachata tunes. But that’s when a tweet caught my eye and piqued my interest…

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Naila Inayat on Twitter

Earlier that week, my mom had called me to tell me how much she loved Furious 7, and recommended that I go see it.

(Ha! She watched it at the local movie theatre, not online.)

Sure, more Indians pirated Furious 7 than any other country, but what does that really tell us about how prevalent piracy is in these countries? If we adjust the numbers to accommodate for their vastly different populations, would that affect the order, I wondered.

I tweeted back:

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/a on Twitter

I couldn’t shake that thought. Although the lure of bachata music was pulling me away from my computer, I went down the rabbit hole…

*opens Excel* Stage 1: Adjust for population

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/a on Twitter

*Good enough, I say! It’s 9pm and I tuck my laptop away, and hop on to an Indian Uber to bachata night*

The next morning… this was still on my mind… the piracy ranking still wasn’t fair because the access to the internet varies across these countries drastically. And since we’re only talking about online piracy, it only seemed fair to adjust for the population that has access to the internet. So a couple of google searches later, it was time to add another column to the spreadsheet.

*opens Excel* Stage 2: Adjust for population that has internet access.

Google was kind enough to give me the data on a silver platter.
India: 15.1%. Pakistan: 10.9%. China: 45.8%. UK: 87%. USA: 84.2%

(Wait… 45.8% of China has access to the internet? Seriously!? That’s impressive.)

Tinkering around with the formulas, and voila:

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/a on Twitter

Each country’s share of pirated downloads of #Furious7 when adjusted for per capita with internet access.

What insights can we gather from this closer look at the data?
(besides the fact that my Excel skills are really rusty.)

1. An average internet user in Pakistan is 5x more likely to have pirated Furious 7 than in India. Indians pirated the movie twice (2x) as many times as the British. The British in turn pirated it twice (2x) as many times as the Americans. And again, Americans pirated it twice as many times as the average Chinese citizen with access to the internet. (The pie chart above speaks to that more elegantly than words.)
2. 45.8% of China has access to the internet. That’s significantly more than India’s 15.1%. I would have guessed that those numbers would be closer together. (But hey, it shows the upside potential for the Indian economy in the next decade.)
3. I’m still not sure whether this is the right analysis for the data. I’m open to being called out on the mistakes in my math, or suggestions on how to better dig deeper into these numbers.
4. I just followed the numbers without any judgement on the countries. If you don’t like what the data tells us, then please don’t hate the player, hate the data.

Fine print: The data only accounts for digital downloads from torrent networks. If you’ve walked through the street in many countries in the developing world (including India and Pakistan), you know that pirated DVDs of movies are readily available in every neighborhood. The data we’re using here does not include such offline piracy channels.

Shout out to @xpangler for writing the article on variety.com and taking me down this rabbit hole.

And as far as what I thought of the movie? I’ll let you know when I watch it.