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The top 10 most pirated TV shows from May 2015

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By Natan Edelsburg, SVP

June 23, 2015 | 5 min read

Savvy and impatient TV fans, no matter what part of the world they're in, or what type of access they pay for, have zero patience to wait for TV to become legally and easily available to them. Since the economics of international TV syndication haven't caught up to the speed of social media and the web fans go to illegal downloading destinations like torrenting sites to get their content when they want it and in time to avoid spoilers.

May Torrents from SimilarWeb

While torrenting is illegal, there are slowly but surely legal alternatives to access TV on the web (in certain parts of the world) and governments are finding ways to crack down, it's important to understand the globe's pulse on the top shows. To report on the world's most popular TV shows each month Found Remote is teaming up with SimilarWeb (a top analytics provider on desktop websites, mobile web and mobile apps), to exclusively provide the most pirated TV shows from the top torrent search engines.

Here are insights on the above charts from SimilarWeb on the most pirated shows from The Pirate Bay, Kickass Torrents (which had to jump around from a Kingdom of Tonga domain to a Costa Rica one in May to avoid getting shutdown) and Torrentz.eu. From a networks perspective, HBO and The CW are the main competitors. CW leads by quantity of the most popular shows while HBO dominates in terms of reach, but this is due to Game of Thrones domination of the charts.

  • Not surprisingly, ‘Game of Thrones’ is the most popular show in May, but the number of visits to the download pages of this series demonstrate its supreme dominance. On the torrent sites listed, ‘Game of Thrones’ received a larger share of traffic as all the other shows from the list combined with the exception of KickassTorrents.
  • TV series based on comic books, both Marvel and DC Comics, are taking tops spots. Supergirl is a perfect example, where only one episode was leaked to the torrents sites recently, and it is already the third most downloaded show on KickassTorrents. DC Comics based shows are dominating, at least on TV, with Gotham, Arrow, The Flash and Supergirl while the only Marvel show to break the top ten is Daredevil.
  • Mr. Robot is another upcoming show that is driving huge interest. The pilot premiered on May 27th and has already captured a huge audience.
  • The presence of many fresh shows in the top ten indicates people are hungry for something new. However, some good old shows have stayed popular throughout the years and through May such as Grey's Anatomy, Vampire Diaries and Vikings.
  • Amid such a variety of fictional TV series, the success of Silicon Valley seems to stand out at first glance. Indeed, it is one of the most loved comedy series on TV at the moment, exploring one of the most trending industries – Hi-tech start ups.
  • Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is another show that stands out with a completely different format than the others but it only made the top ten list for the The Pirate Bay.

In the coming weeks Found Remote will also look at insights from SimilarWeb on top TV networks websites in addition to top OTT (like Netflix and Hulu) websites to better understand the industry.

SimilarWeb is the leading competitive market intelligence firm providing data analytics on desktop websites, mobile web and mobile apps. The SimilarWeb platform provides PPC, SEO, Media Buyers and Affiliates an edge over the competition with actionable insights into their competitor’s marketing tactics. Discover the data for yourself at SimilarWeb.com, with free insights for any website or mobile app.

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Future of TV SimilarWeb Torrentz.eu

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