Research: Megaupload Shutdown Impacted Box Office Sales
Researchers from the Munich School of Management and the Copenhagen Business School suggest that the shutdown of Megaupload had an impact on box office sales.
The research investigated box office sales over a five-year period covering 1,344 released movies in 49 countries. According to their findings, overall movie revenues decreased following the shutdown, but smaller and major movie releases were affected in different ways:
"[…] the shutdown had a negative, yet in some cases insignificant effect on box office revenues." Not all movies were negatively affected: "For blockbusters (shown on more than 500 screens) the sign is positive (and significant, depending on the specification)."
The finding that blockbusters were positively affected by the Megaupload shutdown opens the door for a wide range of speculation, without any clear-cut explanation. However, the researchers offered this version:
"Our counterintuitive finding may suggest support for the theoretical perspective of (social) network effects where file-sharing acts as a mechanism to spread information about a good from consumers with zero or low willingness to pay to users with high willingness to pay. The information-spreading effect of illegal downloads seems to be especially important for movies with smaller audiences."
If that is the case, then we could conclude that the word-of-mouth engine promoted by Megaupload especially benefited smaller productions that don't have access to the marketing resources of larger movies.

You've got movie2k, Potlucker, videoweed etc etc just to name a few.
You've got movie2k, Potlucker, videoweed etc etc just to name a few.
this is a failed attempt at an AD disguise as a "research article".
Cute. Blind naivety always is.
Even though this particular article is nearly as bad as some others, it's embarrassing how Tom's Hardware floats so many stories that implicitly mock the fight against piracy. Perhaps it's because so many of its readers (and writers, I'm sure) actively participate in illegally downloading and sharing content, and would like to continue doing so. Somehow the concept of downloading someone else's hard work illegally is not viewed in the same light as stealing a cd box from a store.
The gaming industry couldn't care less about MegaUpload's piracy, since it was pirating movies not games.
Remember this is Tom's. If you have read some of the unintelligible comments you will see that reading comprehension isn't a highly valued skill here.
The good old Mpaa, I would like to ask them for example why they have not chewed the asses off on makers of DVD drives since they provided the means and hardware allowing for the potential for it to be miss used, copy a medium such as a dvd film. You know its crazy world, did anyone ever invent a dual deck record player to copy a record and provide the blank medium to do it ?
Why do you think that was ? Tape deck with record function, oh crap someone can record a record to tape now! boom why do you think record sales started to decline may I ask ? we gave them the means to do it. you may Laugh but the logic is right. Dvd`s now Blu ray. And to cap it off a world wide medium to spread it on. because you created the devices to make it so. But there that thick they start at the bottom before they work out the way to stop it.
And the end result blame the people. They will learn.
An ad for what? A service that's been offline for about a year and is likely to never return because it's trapped in legal limbo?
An ad from whoever runs the whole anti-piracy crusade.
Read the article again, slower.