An Opportunity In The Theft

In the early days of digital media, the internet also saw the rise of file sharing platforms.

Adoption of the internet was growing by leaps and bounds. Bandwidth capacities struggled (and continue to struggle) to keep up. Once the mp3 audio compression format was adopted, the floodgates were opened and illegal file sharing exploded.

Legislators were caught off guard. Originally file sharing was on par with making a copy of an album by tape cassette and it sharing with a friend. Nobody appreciated how quickly digital copying could scale. Pirated digital media grew meteorically and raised serious alarm bells for content producers.

This still happens now. It’s been said this is decline because of new innovations in the market. But this post isn’t intended to weigh in on any of that.

Some of those content producers were marketers. And some of those marketers saw an opportunity.

For an example, there is an online publisher of strength training products. Their flagship books were utterly amazing. The information and advice was spot on. They also happen to have been written by copywriters. The books had advertisements for other products from the same merchant embedded into the book. Complete with online / snail mail order forms.

These books did a spectacular job of raising the buying temperature of the readers.

Even the illegal readers.

They did sell the book through regular channels, and it did well. But both the legal print/digital copies, and the illegal digital copies also served as one long sales letter. They used these books to pull in customers to order physical products that the merchants controlled the supply of. At the time, there was no competitors in the market.

Somebody looked at illegal downloads and didn’t panic about losing revenues. Somebody saw an opportunity.

They turned piracy into a marketing channel. And you can bet yourself dollars to donuts that this happens now. Every day. The producers of Game of Thrones have information about how many people pay to see the show, and how many people download the show for free.

Some look at this trend and try to spend money to fight back and protect the status quo. Others look at this trend and try to think of creative ways to capitalize on all the extra eyeballs looking at the material.

Marketers know that gaining a captive audience is a difficult task. But once the audience is captivated, the same skills of sales and persuasion apply. It turns out there were ways to generate sales, even in the face of losing traditional sales to illegal downloads. It simply took a mind open to the idea of innovation.