A Systematic Approach to Measuring Advertising Transparency Online: An Australian Case Study

Illicit sharing of infringing content, such as movies and TV, remains a persistent and ongoing threat to the viability of Australia’s creative industries. The revenue model that underpins torrent indexing and file locker sites which enable this sharing – like much of the World Wide Web – is based on advertising. Recent research has suggested that there has been a shift from mainstream to High-Risk advertising on these sites. In this study, advertising targeting Australians was analysed from the Top 500 Google-upheld DMCA complaints for movies and TV distributed by major Hollywood studios, with 10 sites from each complaint sampled for all ads displayed. It was found that only one site carried mainstream advertising with ads targeting Australian consumers. The policy implications of this result and future research directions, including methodology enhancements, are discussed. .