The Netherlands: Dramatic drop in pirated downloads

During the past five years, the percentage of people in The Netherlands that are watching illegal downloads has gone down from 41% in 2013 to 24% this year.

Men still download a lot more men than women, according to market research agency Telecompaper.

According to the Consumer Insights panel of Telecompaper, the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) of the various download methods has decreased significantly: 6% of Dutch people have used this method in the past year. In 2016 it was still 8%, in 2013 18%. The use of newsgroups is unchanged at 6% in October 2017, 2% of Dutch people say they used an FTP server last year to download free content.

The fact that downloading free available content has decreased over the years should come as no surprise. Illegally offered content is being tackled harder and there are more and more affordable alternatives that offer high quality content, including Amazon, Netflix, Videoland and NLZiet.

The reason why people have started downloading less than a year earlier is due to a variety of reasons. For example, 12% indicate that it is now easier to get paid content. Also, 8% of the people surveyed aid they did not download as content was becoming more difficult to find. In 2013, 4% said this was still the reason. 4% of respondents say they download less than in the previous year because the ISP has blocked certain download sites. In November 2015, this was significantly less: 1%.