Piracy Data: Film & TV No Longer Problem No. 1 in 2025 — It’s Manga
While film and TV are usually what come to mind when discussing digital piracy, data from research firm Muso shows the fastest-growing target in 2024 wasn’t any kind of video format at all.
That honor, or dishonor in this case, goes to written media — a spike almost exclusively due to Japanese manga.
Quarterly pirated views for what Muso labels “publishing” jumped roughly 56%, from 16.5 billion in Q1 to 25.7 billion in Q4. Comparatively, quarter-over-quarter illicit views for TV content grew around 36% between Q1 (25.1 billion) and Q4 (32.2 billion).
A spokesperson for Muso also noted that publishing’s 21.82% increase between Q3 and Q4 was “far beyond typical seasonal effects” usually seen toward the end of the year due to factors including the holiday season. (By comparison, illicit TV viewership grew 4% between Q3 and Q4.)
As with TV and film piracy, a key driver of manga’s increased piracy is a lack of access coupled with high demand. While manga has long been a cornerstone of the Japanese entertainment industry, it has gained international popularity in recent years thanks to the rise of online nerd culture and fandoms dedicated to it.
Dimension Market Research estimated last fall that the manga industry’s market size would hit $15 billion in 2024 and $66 billion by 2033, while Animenomics reported digital manga alone generated over $3 billion in sales revenue (around 33% of total revenues for the Japanese publishing industry) last year.
But as more people become interested in classic manga, including “One Piece” and “Chainsaw Man” as well as recent hits such as “Dan Da Dan,” but cannot access them through legitimate channels, they are more likely to turn to piracy as a solution. Barriers to entry can be nearby stores not selling manga, digital subscription platforms being too expensive or unavailable in a given country, a lack of official translations for a given language or a certain series being out of print.
“While licensed manga platforms have expanded, they continue to struggle with simultaneous releases, pricing models and global accessibility,” the spokesperson said. “Piracy sites fill this gap, offering instant, multilingual translations of the latest chapters, often before official releases become available.”
Zooming out to long-term piracy trends both highlights manga’s key role in publishing piracy’s rise and reflects the overall increase in demand for manga. While views on pirated manga sites made up roughly half of publishing’s total pirated viewership in 2019, the 55 billion views to unlicensed manga sites in 2024 has accounted for 70% of all pirated publishing views for the year.
Even while the rise of self-publishing and e-books have also contributed to increased publishing piracy, non-manga publishing viewership landed just below unlicensed film site views (24.5 billion) this past year.
To put it in perspective, views for pirated TV platforms grew around 26% between 2019 and 2024, while those for pirated manga alone grew by 347% in the same five-year span.
Additionally, Muso’s data underscores the fact that manga piracy is indeed a worldwide issue. The top 10 countries generating unlicensed web views for the publishing sector in 2024 — which, again, was overwhelmingly driven by manga — literally span the globe, with the U.S. and Indonesia outpacing Japan and others including Russia, France and Mexico rounding out the list.
Even as manga’s market size continues to grow at an impressive rate, its ballooning piracy has also had monetary consequences. The Japanese Parliamentary Association for Manga, Anime and Games recently estimated manga piracy has cost the industry nearly $7 billion in financial damages in 2024.
But the piracy dilemma also presents an opportunity of untapped consumer potential. While, yes, many of those accessing pirated manga might be doing it simply because it's free, there may be others who are willing to pay but simply don’t have access to the proper channels.
Anime offers a helpful case study on what capitalizing on that demand can look like for manga, given the two mediums’ overlapping fanbase (anime TV shows are often adapted from manga graphic novels or vice versa). Like manga, anime draws huge audiences and is a key impetus for TV piracy: Muso global consumption data for unlicensed TV, which tracks over 800,000 titles, found eight of the top 10 most in-demand pirated shows worldwide in 2024 were anime.
That demand for unlicensed anime adds context to why Crunchyroll, an American company often credited as the first anime-focused streaming service, has seen some of the fastest and most consistent growth of any SVOD platform, tripling its subscriber count since 2021. The likes of Netflix and Disney have only just started to capitalize on anime and give Crunchyroll some real competition.
If anime’s booming popularity is an indication of the worldwide appeal of Japanese animation, then manga presents a prime path for the entertainment industry to capitalize on that appeal. While directly cracking down on piracy platforms is important, and the manga industry is trying to do that in increasingly ambitious ways, the other component for combating piracy should be improving manga access on a global level and converting some of these “pirates” into consumers.
Dig into the data-filled VIP+ special report “The New Face of Content Piracy”
That honor, or dishonor in this case, goes to written media — a spike almost exclusively due to Japanese manga.
Quarterly pirated views for what Muso labels “publishing” jumped roughly 56%, from 16.5 billion in Q1 to 25.7 billion in Q4. Comparatively, quarter-over-quarter illicit views for TV content grew around 36% between Q1 (25.1 billion) and Q4 (32.2 billion).
A spokesperson for Muso also noted that publishing’s 21.82% increase between Q3 and Q4 was “far beyond typical seasonal effects” usually seen toward the end of the year due to factors including the holiday season. (By comparison, illicit TV viewership grew 4% between Q3 and Q4.)
As with TV and film piracy, a key driver of manga’s increased piracy is a lack of access coupled with high demand. While manga has long been a cornerstone of the Japanese entertainment industry, it has gained international popularity in recent years thanks to the rise of online nerd culture and fandoms dedicated to it.
Dimension Market Research estimated last fall that the manga industry’s market size would hit $15 billion in 2024 and $66 billion by 2033, while Animenomics reported digital manga alone generated over $3 billion in sales revenue (around 33% of total revenues for the Japanese publishing industry) last year.
But as more people become interested in classic manga, including “One Piece” and “Chainsaw Man” as well as recent hits such as “Dan Da Dan,” but cannot access them through legitimate channels, they are more likely to turn to piracy as a solution. Barriers to entry can be nearby stores not selling manga, digital subscription platforms being too expensive or unavailable in a given country, a lack of official translations for a given language or a certain series being out of print.
“While licensed manga platforms have expanded, they continue to struggle with simultaneous releases, pricing models and global accessibility,” the spokesperson said. “Piracy sites fill this gap, offering instant, multilingual translations of the latest chapters, often before official releases become available.”
Zooming out to long-term piracy trends both highlights manga’s key role in publishing piracy’s rise and reflects the overall increase in demand for manga. While views on pirated manga sites made up roughly half of publishing’s total pirated viewership in 2019, the 55 billion views to unlicensed manga sites in 2024 has accounted for 70% of all pirated publishing views for the year.
Even while the rise of self-publishing and e-books have also contributed to increased publishing piracy, non-manga publishing viewership landed just below unlicensed film site views (24.5 billion) this past year.
To put it in perspective, views for pirated TV platforms grew around 26% between 2019 and 2024, while those for pirated manga alone grew by 347% in the same five-year span.
Additionally, Muso’s data underscores the fact that manga piracy is indeed a worldwide issue. The top 10 countries generating unlicensed web views for the publishing sector in 2024 — which, again, was overwhelmingly driven by manga — literally span the globe, with the U.S. and Indonesia outpacing Japan and others including Russia, France and Mexico rounding out the list.
Even as manga’s market size continues to grow at an impressive rate, its ballooning piracy has also had monetary consequences. The Japanese Parliamentary Association for Manga, Anime and Games recently estimated manga piracy has cost the industry nearly $7 billion in financial damages in 2024.
But the piracy dilemma also presents an opportunity of untapped consumer potential. While, yes, many of those accessing pirated manga might be doing it simply because it's free, there may be others who are willing to pay but simply don’t have access to the proper channels.
Anime offers a helpful case study on what capitalizing on that demand can look like for manga, given the two mediums’ overlapping fanbase (anime TV shows are often adapted from manga graphic novels or vice versa). Like manga, anime draws huge audiences and is a key impetus for TV piracy: Muso global consumption data for unlicensed TV, which tracks over 800,000 titles, found eight of the top 10 most in-demand pirated shows worldwide in 2024 were anime.
That demand for unlicensed anime adds context to why Crunchyroll, an American company often credited as the first anime-focused streaming service, has seen some of the fastest and most consistent growth of any SVOD platform, tripling its subscriber count since 2021. The likes of Netflix and Disney have only just started to capitalize on anime and give Crunchyroll some real competition.
If anime’s booming popularity is an indication of the worldwide appeal of Japanese animation, then manga presents a prime path for the entertainment industry to capitalize on that appeal. While directly cracking down on piracy platforms is important, and the manga industry is trying to do that in increasingly ambitious ways, the other component for combating piracy should be improving manga access on a global level and converting some of these “pirates” into consumers.
Dig into the data-filled VIP+ special report “The New Face of Content Piracy”