How to work out what piracy costs you
Any estimate of revenue lost to piracy is three numbers multiplied together, and the honest version is the one that shows all three rather than the product alone.
- Exposed copies. How many of your posts exist somewhere you did not put them. Count URLs, not sites: one aggregator page carrying forty posts is forty.
- Diverted subscribers per copy. What fraction of a subscription each exposed copy costs you. This is the number nobody can measure directly and everybody argues about. openDMCA works from 0.45, which sits between the industry claim that every copy is a lost sale — plainly false — and the counter-claim that no copy ever displaces one, which is also false.
- Your subscription price. Use your own, not an average. This is the only one of the three you know exactly.
Multiply and you have a monthly figure. What piracy is genuinely doing to a specific creator is unmeasurable from outside, so treat the result as an order of magnitude for deciding what removal is worth, never as a fact about your business.
A better number, if you want one: watch what happens to renewals in the month after a large leak is removed. That is a measurement rather than an assumption, and it needs no model at all.
Where estimating the cost of piracy yourself stops being useful
The arithmetic is not the hard part, and openDMCA is not going to pretend a multiplication needs a subscription. What is hard is the first input.
Nobody knows their real leak count. The number people type into this box is what they found by searching their own name, which is the visible fraction: indexed pages, on sites that rank. Aggregator pages that Google has not indexed, and closed forums and channels, do not appear in it.
The count is not stable. It moves weekly as posts are re-scraped and mirrored, so an estimate is a snapshot of a moving number rather than a measurement of a fixed one.
An estimate changes nothing on its own. The figure is only useful next to the cost of doing something about it, which is why the honest next step from this page is a price rather than another calculator: what openDMCA costs against that figure.