Have Illegal Downloads Cost ‘50 Shades of Grey’ Producers $5 Million?

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Feb 19, 6:47AM EST

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Do the math. A company that analyzes illegal downloads claims more than 450,000 electronic versions of “50 Shades of Grey” were downloaded on February 14, the day the movie opened. A price per ticket of $10 is a fair estimate. That adds up to almost $5 million, and it does not include all other days the movie was illegally downloaded.

Universal Pictures, a division of Comcast Corp. (NASDAQ: CMCSA), distributed the film, which brought in over $90 million in ticket sales its first weekend in release. The $5 million estimate is modest and could be much larger if downloads were well into the hundreds of thousands beyond those on the release date.

According to Ad Age:

Pirated copies of the erotic drama from Universal Pictures were downloaded 453,109 times through Feb. 16, according to the monitoring firm Excipio GmbH. That’s more than twice as much, by comparison, as 2014’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” on its first weekend.

The magazine’s editors pointed out that the quality of the downloads was poor. However, people who downloaded the movie were unlikely to watch it in a theater, unless they wanted to watch it twice or more.

It would be easy to believe that the shutdown of a number of file sharing services has curtailed the illegal digital download problem. Recently one of the more prominent ones — Rapid Share — was closed. Based on file sharing figures, apparently as one is shuttered, another one or more are launched.

The $5 million estimated loss to file sharing for the producers of “50 Shades of Grey” is probably much too low. The number is certainly well beyond that into the millions of dollars, if not the tens of millions of dollars. The downloads eventually will hurt more than theater sales. Legitimate online sales of the movie will start in several months, and illegal downloads will suck money from those as well.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.