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The annual shopping frenzy around Black Friday and Cyber Monday brings with it a meteoric surge in traffic for eCommerce websites. While the immediate surge in visitors might seem like a cause for celebration, SRE teams understand that with great traffic comes great responsibility. A significant portion of this seemingly exponential traffic influx comprises bots, with estimates suggesting their presence could be as high as 

. This blog post delves into the critical aspects of handling bot traffic during the Black Friday shopping extravaganza, differentiating between the "good bots" and the "bad bots," and how their management can be the defining factor between a successful shopping weekend and a site overwhelmed by traffic.

Malicious bots now inundate commerce sites with over 5 trillion requests in 15 months per Akamai’s research paper 

Entering Through the Gift Shop: Attacks on Commerce, State of the Internet, Volume 9, Series 3”

. Bot traffic spikes during holidays to enable fraud and degrade performance through tactics like credential stuffing attacks, price scraping, and diverting customers. Even seemingly benign bots can still negatively impact customer experience and business metrics.

, play an essential role in improving search rankings by meticulously crawling and indexing website content. However, during peak traffic periods like Black Friday, it's crucial to guide them towards cached pages. This redirection ensures that they do not inadvertently consume the resources intended for genuine customers, thus optimizing the overall user experience.

On the flip side, lurking in the digital shadows, we have the "bad bots." These nefarious entities encompass a spectrum of disruptive elements, including scraping bots, spam bots, and malicious bots. They are not just resource hogs; they pose a real threat to website integrity by potentially launching DDoS attacks. As the Black Friday traffic intensifies, it becomes imperative to employ countermeasures.

, a deceptive technique that can divert and trap malicious bots. Honeypots are essentially fake pages or endpoints deliberately designed to attract and identify malicious activity. When a bad bot attempts to access these honeypots, it becomes ensnared in a web of deceit, enabling the security team to analyze its behavior and take appropriate action.

Additionally, sophisticated bot management tools can play a crucial role in identifying and mitigating the threats posed by bad bots. Techniques such as IP reputation filtering and behavioral analysis are invaluable in distinguishing and deterring bot traffic.

If your website experienced performance bottlenecks or, worse yet, outages during the Black Friday weekend, undocumented bot traffic might have played a significant role. The absence of clear visibility into your traffic composition makes capacity planning and forecasting a daunting challenge. Moreover, detailed metrics concerning anonymous traffic, user sessions, purchase funnels, and promotional campaigns can be adversely affected. After all, bots are not prone to completing purchases or clicking on personalized recommendations.

In preparation for Cyber Monday 2024 and beyond, consider the following PhotonIQ AI-powered services to get ahead of malicious bots and wasted resources:

: Deploy intelligent virtual waiting rooms during traffic spikes to manage the influx of visitors effectively. Note not all virtual waiting rooms are created the same. Some services may not be able to handle the scale or intelligently move traffic to prevent overload or users in an endless queue.

: Employ advanced visitor fingerprinting techniques to identify and categorize anonymous traffic, enabling tailored responses. Older fingerprint technologies may be code-heavy and difficult to implement as a fraud prevention tool and personalization without negatively affecting performance, which  

: Complement legacy defenses by using honeypot trap triggers to detect bots in real time. By continuously monitoring bot interactions with the honeypots in real-time, analytics can correlate which honey triggers to use to block future bots.

Proactively managing bot traffic is not just a matter of technical optimization; it's a strategic necessity. By ensuring that resources are allocated judiciously and primarily serve authentic customers, you can guarantee a smoother and more profitable shopping season next year. Be sure to download the "

" with monthly tips on planning for the holiday season traffic and sales opportunities.

Let us know if you need assistance in identifying visitors, managing traffic, and keeping those malicious bots at bay! Schedule a chat with an 

Navigating The Bot Rush Of Cyber 5 2024

, a 7.8% increase over the previous year for the Cyber 5. Interest rates were down to 

, around half or greater than the past previous years. Trends are moving away from pandemic changes like curb pick up decreasing and mobile on the rise - instead of desktop due to WFH workers.

 are a critical time for revenue gains, a 2023 

 indicated that 50% of US SMBs report holiday sales make up at least 25 percent of their annual revenue. It is even more significant for retail SMBs who are 2x as likely to rely on the holidays for at least 50% of their yearly revenue. Overall, US retail companies make about 13% of their annual revenue over the holidays per 

The other key issues is that traffic can be 

 on key sales day like Black Friday. Unfortunately not all site visitors are interested prospects or paying customers - some are benign and malicious bots. 

 recorded 5 trillion bot requests over 15 months (Jan 1 2022 - March 31 2023) for commerce companies and malicious bots rose in the holiday period.

 infrastructure teams face tough challenges in providing reliable, smooth experiences during sales spikes. A continuous 12-month plan can ensure systems stay resilient despite rising complexity. This also can improve the customer journey, drive better conversion rates and revenue, and reduce stress on the infrastructure and the teams that keep everything up and running.

Some teams may test shortly before the event due to resource restraints - but that can create a lot of pressure during the actual event. 

, who indicated they experience about 5x the traffic on Black Friday, provided a candid review of their preparation approach and improvements from year to year.

Sometimes the holiday event itself becomes a “surprise” trial that has pitfalls in real time and a new set of best practices or site changes result. Lowe’s experienced downtime during 

 and revamped their site infrastructure to scale, which ended up being great preparation for the pandemic.

Combining ongoing performance testing with layered defense development and  modernization tailored to improved customer experience and traffic surges, a year-round focus promises smoother sales seasons ahead. Let’s take a quick look at each month that is detailed in the guide.

 performance identifies gaps in recommendations aligned to purchase interests. Legacy algorithms mismatch anonymous high-value visitors, wasting opportunities to build loyalty. Updated approaches dynamically serve relevant content without being invasive, considering infrastructure load tradeoffs.

Inspecting traffic reports unveils peaks where unknown visitors overwhelm defenses despite offering sales potential. Smart 

 securely recognizes site history and habits for tailored experiences boosting conversion versus excessive bot filtering. Controlled testing prevents performance degradation.

Managing rising visitor volumes across unknown users requires securely distinguishing high-intent traffic for conversion experiences while filtering excessive bots straining infrastructure. Success requires precision tracking that builds loyalty without latency tradeoffs. Prioritizing user journeys guides decisions maximizing targeting relevancy under peak loads.

Slow page loads directly curb revenue as conversion falters at final steps. Diagnosing checkout and key category landing speeds discovers common bottlenecks like images. Refining caching, tags, and

 targets the highest visibility pages first while monitoring platform overhead.

 weaknesses impacting revenue. Slow queries inflate infrastructure load while outdated indexing algorithms miss commercial intent. By assessing abandonments tied to poor discovery and diagnosing backend bottlenecks, SREs can strategically improve relevancy, speed relevance, and scale efficiency pre-summer.

With product teams chasing content gains, SREs must validate that their site infrastructure can serve fresh pages rapidly for indexing. Reviewing technical limitations around load speeds, proper crawling allowances, and index coverage sets foundations for driving 

 and associated revenue lifts through better built architecture.

June - Optimize site-wide performance by platform

After improving product pages and SEO, holistically 

 across devices using real user data. Prioritizing mobile page speed optimizations for CDN, caching, APIs and more adheres to technical hierarchy for maximum gains.

July - Pressure test and enhance bot defenses

 conditions to reveal infrastructure delivery capacity and journey stability risks before visitor volumes overwhelm systems. Review 

 gap analysis, comparing projected infiltration against mitigation capacities to determine where additional protections must be deployed to avoid “fake” traffic issues. Locking down infrastructure through bot defense improvements secures reliability. Getting ahead of scaling demands requires models guiding sufficient provisioning margins.

August - Plan out load and stress testing

 with proactive traffic modeling, isolated test environments, and gradual load scaling to ensure peak demand readiness. This includes setting up user loads, real-world scenarios, and monitoring performance for production readiness during high-demand times.

Prepare for high-demand scenarios by building replicated test environments that mirror production databases, caching, third-party services, and user flows. Ensure scalability through configured rules and alerts for robust load testing while isolating the test environments. Use canary deployments as a lower cost testing option.

October - Blitz scale testing and break points

Increasing load testing durations with real-world traffic models surface infrastructure stability limits and automatic scaling policy defects far quicker for remediation. Pushing past projections stress-tests fallbacks before visitors ever experience disruptions even under extremes.

November - Execute final verification tests

Focus on final verification tests early in the month to guarantee reliability under projected loads and optimize monitoring and alerting systems for peak season readiness, ensuring a seamless observability experience without disrupting live production.

December – Construct tactical reliability roadmaps

Grounded in traffic projections, load test learnings, and next-generation infrastructure appetite, tactical reliability roadmaps set data-driven priorities balancing visitor experience targets with operational scaling imperatives. Formalizing 12-month plans unifies teams against common delivery milestones.

Get ready for 2024 with the Cyber 5 guide!

" with monthly instructions on planning for the holiday season traffic and sales opportunities. Starting early lets you focus on key areas from personalization to traffic management and load testing your environment.

AI-powered services to improve performance and uptime even at Black Friday scale

Overhauling existing systems can take months - or even years to accomplish and may require significant resources that are not readily available. At the same time, customer expectations continue to increase and some changes may be necessary to stay ahead of the competition. With Macrometa, you can implement 

 in 60 days or less without changing code or your existing systems.

: This intelligent caching proxy dramatically accelerates website speed - boosting HTML, CSS, and JS delivery by up to 300% - without any loss in quality.

: This innovative solution optimizes JavaScript by consolidating all tags into simplified edge-side code, significantly speeding up script loading and execution.

: This capability effectively manages sudden traffic spikes by queuing incoming requests, ensuring fast, reliable performance even when sites see dramatic surges in visitors.

: This service prerenders and serves full web pages at the edge to users and crawlers alike, slashing latency and boosting SEO.

: This privacy-first service enables more contextual site experiences by recognizing visitors across devices without requiring invasive tracking across sites or sign-ins.

To learn more about PhotonIQ services and how they can meet SREs’ unique goals, be sure to chat with an 

SRE Monthly Guide For 2024 Cyber Five Readiness 

At first glance SEO falls outside the traditional reliability and infrastructure scope that Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) teams focus on. Product managers drive keyword targeting and content development while marketing focuses on link building and domain authority metrics.

But the reality is SEO has widespread, cascading effects on technical site performance, infrastructure capacity planning, and overall customer experience – key areas that deeply impact SREs. After all, 

 of an eCommerce site's total traffic often originates from organic and paid search.

While they don’t control on-page copy, any backend decisions made by SREs regarding site architecture, data pipelines, monitoring tools and more can torpedo an otherwise high-traction 

 strategy. Technical obstacles easily block bots from properly indexing and surfacing content as well.

By expanding their view of SEO beyond simply chasing vanity rankings, SREs can better support business outcomes in partnership with product teams. This blog covers 6 core reasons SEO merits ongoing optimization.

Reason 1: SEO directly drives infrastructure-straining traffic volumes

Spikes in organic visibility send influxes of 

 to capitalize on, directly impacting capacity planning and scaling for SREs. While moving up one position in Google rankings will increase your absolute CTR by an average of 2.8%, it varies greatly depending on the position per 

. Further analysis from the same research shows moving from #2 to #1 offers the greatest increase with a relative CTR boost of 74.5%.

Unprepared infrastructure immediately strains under sudden jumps. By modeling and projecting SEO traffic impacts, then aligning server, CDN and database expansions to expected growth, reliability suffers far fewer hiccups.

Reason 2: Site uptime and speed metrics have direct SEO ranking impacts

Google actively monitors site availability, uptime percentage, and 

 KPIs including Time to First Byte (TTFB), First Input Delay, First Contentful Paint and overall Core Web Vitals. All have documented influences on search rankings for terms a site targets. For example, Google indicates that companies should aim for a server response time under 

200ms within their PageInsights documentation

 from 2019. By optimizing these metrics with reliable cache delivery, lean configs and nimble autoscaling, SREs ensure SEO retention.

Reason 3: Web team partnerships around SEO depend on performance

While driving organic strategy, onsite product teams rely heavily on SREs architecting a platform that can dynamically serve experiences at scale. Without optimizing DB calls, intelligent caching, 

 allowlisting and JS efficiency for crawlers, even the best content falls flat.

Constructive collaboration around balancing featured content launches, URL migrations and schema changes with technical SEO concerns leads to shared success. Prioritizing crawl budget alerts, bot-specific observations and site speed bolsters effectiveness.

Reason 4: SEO influences architecture and site change strategy

Thoughtful SEO analysis should inform technical decision making on new microservices, CSS delivery, rendering logics and deprecation timelines. If supporting infrastructure can’t digest Core Web Vital wins from React frameworks for example, expected organic visibility gains may be completely lost.

Data pipeline design or database migration approaches that impede crawler bot access or slow down page load frequencies will jeopardize hard-won SEO gains. Considering SEO as a pivotal technical constraint 

 reliability planning while improving agility to scale efficiency.

Reason 5: Optimizing SEO improves customer experience

When SEO delivers more high-intent visitors primed for conversion at scale, but site infrastructure fumbles page loads, checkout flows or stock integrations, bounce rates can increase. Or worse, cart abandonment will rise and loyalty churns, as repeat customers try other sites.

Constructing a SEO-friendly site also means crafting technically frictionless 

. Strong organic outcomes and conversion velocity KPIs go hand in hand by aligning SEO search relevancy with user experience excellence.

Reason 6: Higher SEO visibility drives more revenue, funding tech

 reveals that identifying the best potential customers stands as the second largest challenge for eCommerce in 2023.

Increased transaction volumes and order values from improved SEO position directly justifies further investments back into supporting infrastructure reliability, availability and resilience. More revenue funds better architecture. Customer experience and conversions come full circle back to capacity planning and scaling.

 should actively participate in SEO analysis due to wide ranging impacts on traffic loads, site performance benchmarks, web team partnership effectiveness and customer experience calibration.

In reality, achieving observability across critical SEO signals like crawler budgets, index coverage, page speed 

 and journey friction points should be standard practice. With shared visibility into both algorithmic prominence gains and revenue cycle performance, joint prioritization and reliable scaling naturally improve hand in hand.

Boosting page loads and SEO with PhotonIQ Prerendering

 can speed up site delivery and indexing for search engines without the need for significant process or internal resources. Our optimized prerendering process generates static pages from your dynamic site, ensuring full content indexing and lightning-fast page loads. This dramatically cuts time-to-first-byte and improves site visibility for SEO. Learn more by chatting with an 

6 Reasons SEO Should Be A Top Priority For eCommerce SREs

Historically, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) have been laser-focused on performance metrics and ensuring systems are always up and running. While uptime remains critical, the scope of SRE responsibilities is expanding. Modern users demand more than just accessibility and speed; they want a seamless and delightful experience. This shift underscores the need for SREs to think holistically about customer experience.

Prioritizing customer experience: expanding the SRE mission

In the world of SREs, the core mission has always been clear: ensure systems are reliable, scalable, and available. SREs have relentlessly pursued the challenge of "five nines" (99.999% uptime), and their dedication to system resilience is unwavering. However, as the digital landscape evolves, there's a growing realization that reliability alone isn't enough. 

, site reliability engineering should not just focus narrowly on metrics and percentages. More importantly, it involves defining reliability from the customer's point of view and letting their experience guide data-informed decisions. During the podcast, Google’s Nathen Harvey indicated, “We have to take a customer–or user-centric point of view of our systems.”

” and must advocate for the customer or end-user. Enter a new imperative beyond the 

Customer experience impacts every SRE should know

When you consider the four golden signals - latency, traffic, errors, and saturation - they can all have an impact on the user experience. Traditionally, SREs are not hesitant about questioning the why and understanding natural correlations. So while running things efficiently has a direct correlation to revenue, another key factor is the 

. Let’s run through key components of the customer experience and SREs’ role.

 Customer experience directly influences a company's reputation. When digital services not only perform reliably but also provide a smooth and user-friendly experience, users are more likely to view the company favorably. By the same token, when these services are not reliable, customers are extremely displeased, which can be seen  when customers tried to buy 

 or popular streaming platforms can experience downtime. SREs are monitoring issues, traffic, and latency to ensure this positive experience.

 Exceptional customer experiences foster 

. Users who enjoy a seamless experience are more likely to remain loyal, contributing to long-term business success. A customer experience study revealed that nearly 

 will take their business elsewhere following a negative interaction. This means if the site crashes or responses are slow, customers will take their business elsewhere. SREs can continually monitor metrics and tweak the infrastructure with 

 and other tools to deliver a better experience.

Customer satisfaction translates to business success. Users who have a positive experience are more likely to engage with a platform, leading to higher revenue generation. SREs can prepare for busy periods and understand the customer journey to help ensure satisfaction.

SREs can play a proactive role in identifying potential customer experience issues. By monitoring not only uptime but also performance metrics, they can spot degradations in service quality before users are significantly affected.

 (like what are they clicking on the most or getting caught up in) and when promotions or other events will make the traffic peak.

 SREs is how fast and operational checkout is - because that is how the business makes revenue. 

 is an important phase in the customer journey. No one likes it when items disappear from their cart or the wheel of wait time spins continuously after you hit purchase.

To prioritize customer experience effectively, SREs must embark on a journey into the world of the end-users. This journey encompasses every facet of a user's interaction with a service. Each touchpoint, from the first interaction to ongoing usage and support, shapes the user's perception of the service.

 stands tall among the pillars of customer experience. Users today expect lightning-fast responses from websites and apps. Slow-loading pages or apps with glitches can quickly drive users away. Let’s explore ways SREs can improve customer experiences in their day-to-day tasks.

Strategies for SREs to enhance customer experience

To consider customer experience as an SRE, here are some strategies to implement:

 Continuously monitor and optimize system performance. Pay attention to response times, error rates, and the overall user interface. Since SREs are concerned and measured on latency, this becomes a way to deliver faster speeds.

 Implement user-centric monitoring to gain insights into how real users experience your services. This includes tracking user interactions, load times, and user satisfaction rather than a whole focus on internal performance metrics.

 When incidents occur, assess their impact on users' experiences. Prioritize incident resolution based on potential customer impact.

 Foster collaboration between SREs and User Experience (UX) or User Interface (UI) teams. Aligning technical performance with user-centered design is essential to creating an experience fabricated around customer delight.

 Incorporate user feedback into your monitoring and improvement processes. Users often provide valuable insights into pain points.

 Plan infrastructure capacity and test load handling to manage usage spikes and prevent outages especially during peak events.

 Analyze site visitors to differentiate human customers from 

 and prioritize optimization for real user experiences and stop wasting resources on bad bot traffic and prevent them from creating havoc.

Exceptional customer experience is a collaborative effort. SREs, developers, designers, and other teams must work hand in hand. Building and maintaining systems that not only function but also provide an enjoyable and efficient experience is a shared responsibility.

In closing, the role of Site Reliability Engineers is evolving. While unwavering reliability and availability remain paramount, the contemporary digital landscape demands more. By actively monitoring and 

, empathizing with the user journey, and fostering collaboration across teams, SREs can make a substantial difference.

Their contribution goes beyond keeping systems running; it's about ensuring that users have a remarkable experience. Balancing reliability and 

 is the path to thriving in a competitive digital realm. So, to all SREs out there, remember: your mission is not just to keep the lights on; it's to ensure those lights shine brilliantly.

AI-powered services go beyond typical SRE tools 

Backend and application improvements can take months or even years to accomplish and may require significant resources - human, time, space, or budgets - that are not readily available. At the same time, customer expectations continue to increase and some changes may be necessary to stay ahead of the competition. With Macrometa, you can implement 

 in 60 days or less without changing your existing systems.

: This privacy-first system enables more contextual site experiences by recognizing visitors across devices without requiring invasive tracking across sites or sign-ins.

Why SREs Need To Consider Customer Experiences

, “State of the Internet / Security: Pirates in the Outfield,” published in January 2022.

Before we dive into the report, let’s talk about 

 and why they are both on the rise. Even post-pandemic, people spend a lot of time watching or listening to content on personal devices or TVs - 

 predicts Americans will spend 186 minutes a day video streaming on devices and 131 minutes a day watching TV in 2026. This marks a 17.25% increase for streaming, and 17.6% decrease for TV compared to 2022.

 continues to rise as viewers increasingly prefer the convenience, personalization, variety, affordability, and flexibility it provides over traditional television viewing. The growth in devices that enable easy on-demand access to streaming platforms anywhere  - like 

Piracy stats: an insatiable appetite for illegally viewed content

There were 215 billion visits to piracy websites globally in 2022, an 18% increase from 2021 according to a 

. The United States had the highest demand for pirated film and TV content, with over 13.5 billion visits to piracy sites.

What is particularly interesting is that a 

 across 10 countries and involving over 6,000 sports fans revealed that even though 89% of respondents have paid subscriptions to watch live sports, 51% continue to use illegal streaming sites and services to view sporting events every month. 

 who use illegal streaming services do so because they think legal options are too costly. Companies can try to offer different priced viewing options to deter piracy but there are other ways to safeguard their content which we will explore from the Akamai paper.

Widespread piracy: the jarring global scope

Pirating is not a small issue, or limited to one region. According to data from MUSO in the Akamai report, there were 3.7 billion instances of consumers accessing pirated content globally between January and September 2021. The data shows that most consumers - 61.5% - directly visited sites hosting pirated materials, while 28.6% used search engines to find pirated content. Television saw the highest amount of piracy with over 67 billion total visits, followed by publishing and films.

The State of the Internet/Security Akamai report focuses on media piracy, examining it from economic, technological, and scale perspectives. Akamai has long studied piracy's impact on businesses. Key lessons are that piracy is a growing security concern and business issue rather than just a cost of doing business, while also generating profits for criminals. Akamai partnered with MUSO for data and insights across industries like streaming, software, and publishing. Together they analyze piracy trends in sports, TV, film, and more. The report aims to provide visibility into the piracy landscape and help media companies protect and value their digital content.

The report detailed how the entertainment industry has benefited from video streaming, especially during COVID-19 lockdowns. However, streaming has also blurred the line between piracy and consumption. Some perceive downloading or re-streaming content as harmless since the original remains, forgetting these acts cost millions to produce and impact livelihoods.

In 2019, US creative industries provided $229B economic benefit and 2.6M jobs per the 

U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center

, but piracy causes $29B in lost revenue annually. Less revenue means less incentive to develop new content, ultimately hurting producers, athletes, workers, and fans. While some pirates don't care and profit off re-streaming or mirror legitimate sites but charge fees or show a page full of ads, piracy harms the entire production ecosystem. Streaming made entertainment accessible but enabling piracy risks creative industry jobs and output.

The report listed how pirates employ various tactics to illegally access and distribute content. Three common piracy approaches are:

Link sharing and token harvesting - Pirate apps access events using stolen or reused access tokens, and monetize the content with their own ads.

Stream ripping and re-streaming - Pirates will broadcast events on public social platforms like Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook.

VPN/proxy services - Pirates and users leverage VPNs or proxies to bypass geographic restrictions and access content.

What they're watching: top pirated titles

Sometimes seeing content that you or your family and friends may have watched can show just how widespread the problem with piracy is across the globe. Let’s take a look at 2022 and 2021.

 indicated “Spider-Man: No Way Home” was at 21% percent, “The Batman” was at 13%, and “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” made up 10% of piracy demand for films in 2022. “Thor Love and Thunder”, “Black Adam”, “Uncharted, Eternals”, “Top Gun Maverick”, “Jurassic World Domination”, and “Encanto” each made up less than 10% of the demand in that top 10 list.

The Akamai report showed 1. “Godzilla vs. Kong” 2. “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” 3. “Black Widow” 4. “F9” 5. “Mortal Kombat” (2021) 6. “The Suicide Squad” (2021) 7. “Cruella” 8. “Wonder Woman 1984” 9. “Raya and the Last Dragon” 10. “Jungle Cruise” as the most pirated films from January 2021- September 2021 based on the MUSO research.

Piracy in action: case studies from live events

During a 2020 live event in southern Asia, pirates employed various techniques to try to illegally access and distribute the event's stream. Methods included user-agent spoofing, rebroadcasting on social platforms like Twitch and YouTube, reusing access tokens, and modifying apps to bypass protections.

Akamai's Media Center Protector (MCP) combined with other Akamai services detected these piracy attempts, bringing piracy levels down from 40% to 15% during the event. However, pirates persisted with new tactics like DDoS attacks to trigger failover events.

This led to a Zero Trust approach, presuming all clients compromised until validated. In total, billions of requests were blocked or mitigated during the event. Combating piracy requires constant vigilance and balancing legitimate access with attack prevention.

During a July 2021 single-day US sporting event, pirates used various techniques to illegally access the live broadcast. Analysis of over 18 million records showed 4 million suspect instances, including thousands of VPN addresses, over 34,000 shared tokens, and 292,000 unique user-agents. The top shared token was reused over 19,000 times. Popular but open-source video players like Kodi were observed hundreds of thousands of times, often modified by pirates for illegal streaming. There were 39 suspect referral domains representing over 65% of suspicious traffic. Despite occurring in just hours, the event saw extensive piracy attempts through credential sharing, modified open-source software, and suspect referral links. Constant vigilance is required to combat the evolving methods pirates employ to illegally access high-value live content.

By the numbers: piracy statistics by industry

MUSO data shows the overwhelming majority of piracy is via direct site access rather than searching. From Jan-Sep 2021, there were 82B visits to piracy sites for just TV and film. Combined with music, software, publishing the total reaches 132B visits. Top countries are the US, Russia, India, China, and Brazil.

By industry, TV sees 67B visits and is the top pirated content. Publishing is next with 30B visits, followed by film at 14.5B. Music has 10.8B visits and software 9B. For TV, top sources are US, Russia and China. Publishing piracy is led by US, Japan and Russia. Film's top source is India then Turkey and US. Music piracy comes primarily from India, Iran and US. Software sees most piracy in China, Russia and US.

The massive visit totals across industries shows the large scale of piracy worldwide. Direct access to pirate sites dominates, signaling a need for consumer awareness and site blocking.

Key takeaways: highlights from the report

The recent Akamai report sheds light on the persistent issue of widespread media piracy globally, including the methods pirates use and how media companies can implement defenses. Here are some key highlights from the report or view the 

 to learn more about Akamai’s research and solutions to thwart content piracy.

Global piracy demand exceeded 3 billion visits in the first 3 quarters of 2021, showing a huge public appetite for streaming content through illegal means.

Many pirates also pay for legal streaming services, turning to piracy when content is unavailable through legal means.

Piracy is a full-time criminal enterprise, while defending against it is a constant struggle for legal broadcasters and streamers who lack visibility into threats.

Criminals exploit workflow and API vulnerabilities, and use multiple methods, requiring layered defenses.

With the visibility and protections in place, media companies can curb piracy. But it remains an ongoing battle as criminals constantly adapt to find new ways to illegally access coveted content.

Add another layer of protection against piracy with Macrometa

curb piracy for OTT video streaming services

 exclusive content to specific geographical regions. This enhances compliance with licensing agreements.

Revoke access for compromised credentials

Macrometa enables immediate invalidation of any compromised user tokens. This promptly cuts off unauthorized access to protected content. By leveraging Macrometa's seamless content distribution and efficient token revocation capabilities, streaming providers can effectively clamp down on piracy.

To learn more, schedule some time with one of our 

, personalization, and real-time data enrichment services, read this brief 

Access Denied: Curbing The Growing Menace of Digital Piracy

Ecommerce Threatened By Rising Cyberattacks

Whether it is the launch of a new game, or much anticipated new release, or even a popular gaming period (like a holiday break), gaming studios need to be ready for surges in traffic. There are an estimated 

. Even in typical traffic periods, virtual waiting rooms can balance server loads, ensure 

Archive

Navigating The Bot Rush Of Cyber 5 2024

SRE Monthly Guide For 2024 Cyber Five Readiness

6 Reasons SEO Should Be A Top Priority For eCommerce SREs

Why SREs Need To Consider Customer Experiences

Access Denied: Curbing The Growing Menace of Digital Piracy

Ecommerce Threatened By Rising Cyberattacks

Elevating Gaming Experiences With Smarter Traffic Management

Unlocking The Future of Gaming: Insights From The Great Cloud Reset

Navigating The Evolving Landscape Of Online Gaming Security