Adalytics is out with another summer blockbuster, of sorts.
For at least a year, Adalytics has observed creator accounts on YouTube eluding the platform’s IP and rights monitoring tech to distribute movies, shows and live sports that should be exclusive to streaming or cable subscriptions.
The findings, published on Monday, were first reported by The New York Times over the weekend.
This practice is particularly difficult to identify for a few reasons. One is that crafty YouTube operators know how to game Content ID, YouTube’s automated copyright detection technology. Also, rightsholders often allow copyrighted material to remain on YouTube, while sharing in the ad revenue. Viewers are unaware when this is the case.
But there is also a lack of transparency in YouTube’s ad reporting.
According to one buyer at a large agency and a marketer at a major US consumer brand, YouTube redacts information about copyrighted material and posts that violate terms of service from its campaign reports.
Both of these sources contributed to the Adalytics report and later spoke with AdExchanger.
YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon told AdExchanger the Adalytics report fails to account for how copyright practices work on YouTube.
For example, he said, Content ID flagged 2.2 billion instances of copyright-protected videos on the platform in 2024. Of those, more than 90% were approved by the rightsholder, who can choose to remove the post or share in the advertising revenue and free distribution.
“To frame these videos as ‘illicit’ without first reviewing the specific choices made by each rightsholder is inaccurate and misunderstands how the media landscape on YouTube works today,” Malon said. “It’s not up to Adalytics, nor YouTube, to decide what constitutes copyright infringement; that decision is up to the rightsholder.”
Gaming the system
So what exactly is going on here?
YouTube account operators post movies that are still in theaters or exclusive to streaming services, some of which is certainly not approved by the IP owner. Think Disney’s “Lilo & Stitch,” the Warner Bros.-backed “Sinners” and exclusive shows like Netflix’s “Squid Games.” The videos are often given unabashed titles, like “Lilo y Stitch, Película completa” and “Squid Games 3 in English.”
These videos rack up hundreds of thousands of views – but not millions, and that’s by design. The accounts make sure to remove the content or edit the link within a couple of days of posting to avoid YouTube’s IP detection. Sometimes, the title is changed and the content replaced with something innocuous, like a long stream of someone playing video games, say, or doing busywork at their desk. Other times, the video is pulled entirely.
To stream a live sports program, per the report, a YouTube scammer will often play the content using a real subscription. Adalytics, for example, documented college football games being screencast on YouTube via Paramount+ and ESPN+. Every five minutes or so, the video might awkwardly zoom in and out of focus, or blur and discolor, which is apparently a mechanism to evade detection by YouTube.
Most of these accounts have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers despite sometimes having zero listed videos or just one or two meaningless placeholder vids. These high subscriber numbers suggest that repeat viewers are tracking accounts to see which shows or movies are free to watch on YouTube.
The millions of cumulative views on these videos generate an even greater number of ad impressions, since some videos serve ads multiple times in a program or, more commonly, play back-to-back sponsored placements once someone has watched for a few minutes.
Subtraction by redaction
Advertisers often bemoan the lack of transparency into walled gardens. The latest Adalytics report provides a clear example of that frustration in practice.
YouTube campaign reports can be bucketed based on three grades of placement transparency, according to the Adalytics report.
Some impressions include the URL, the account name and video title, while in other cases YouTube will disclose the URL, but the account and video title are redacted or edited.
AdExchanger spoke with two agency buyers who were unaware of the Adalytics report to confirm that the latter represents a single-digit or low double-digit percentage of spend on YouTube. When advertisers visit the URL, they usually see that the video was pulled for a terms-of-service violation. The video may also have been made private by the account.
The third bucket – and often the largest overall for a high-spending YouTube advertiser – is what’s called the “Total: Other” category, which discloses no URL or any information regarding where ads were served.
But that doesn’t mean this information isn’t available.
YouTube provides placement details, but only if an advertiser is able to pull a report quickly enough, according to the agency buyer and CPG advertiser AdExchanger spoke with.
For example, the agency buyer ran his own personal test campaigns targeting about 40 videos listed in the report, primarily major motion studio content “that definitely was not approved by the rightsholder.”
When he pulled a report within a day, he said, the placement-level information was there to see, shining a light on those scam accounts and videos. If he waited a few days to pull his campaign report, though, most of the videos would disappear into “Total: Other.” Any videos still disclosed in the campaign report were by then just mundane placeholder posts, he said, since the account operator had already edited the content to avoid being flagged by YouTube.
The lack of transparency in YouTube’s campaign reporting makes it nearly impossible to understand how, when and how much of this kind of IP infringement exists on the platform.
The same agency buyer said that of the tens of millions of cumulative YouTube ad dollars spent between 2023-2025, which he and Adalytics examined for the report, there were millions of dollars found going to videos that were removed for copyright infractions and other terms-of-service violations.
And that just covers the “sliver” of ad impressions from those reports for which the video URL was still available. “That doesn’t even account for the Total: Other placements.”
Advertisers expect little visibility from walled garden platforms, but the post-facto redaction of campaign reports is a bitter pill.
“Can you imagine,” he said, “if advertisers discovered a week after the fact that The Trade Desk was redacting thousands of impressions – all of them highly discreditable – from advertisers’ log files?”
The same agency ad buyer said he ran his own tests because he anticipates that Google will maintain that ads are mostly refunded and content creators not paid for these placements.
The tests were relatively small sample sizes, he said, consisting of less than $100 in spend. But only a minuscule fraction of those placements were refunded, he said, around 1% of the total budget. This despite the ads serving exclusively to a pool of inventory that he said ought to be refunded.
A tale of two algos
But perhaps the more burning question is: How does this stuff get by YouTube in the first place?
YouTube’s Content ID is an effective safeguard. Even advertisers who were involved in the Adalytics report agree.
The agency buyer who spoke with AdExchanger said that, in a spirit of inquiry, he downloaded the video file from an IP-infringing YouTube post and re-uploaded it to a burner account that he used while doing research for the report. It was immediately flagged by Content ID as Viacom property, and he was given the choice to appeal or remove.
Still, someone was able to post that file under the radar and keep it live for days. Many of the scam accounts documented by Adalytics appear to originate in India, Pakistan or Vietnam, said the agency buyer, based on information the accounts list about themselves, the languages they post in and the times of day when they post or remove videos.
So perhaps the Content ID rules are more stringent depending on the country, the source speculated.
Also, the viewer may understand that a video is a copyrighted production, although Content ID is allowing that distribution when the rightsholder opts to monetize via the ad revenue share.
“This means their copyrighted work remains on YouTube at their discretion,” Malon said.
Fair enough.
But it becomes a problem when YouTube’s recommendation algorithm steps in, said the agency buyer and brand marketer who spoke to AdExchanger regarding the report. When copyright-protected content slips by Content ID or is sometimes stetted by the IP owner, YouTube amplifies it through its recommendation algo.
“We don’t even need to look for them,” the agency buyer said of the 200-plus movies and shows identified in the Adalytics report. The videos were “spoon-fed” to them by YouTube’s algorithm.
Even over the July Fourth holiday weekend, in a briefing with AdExchanger, Adalytics Founder and CEO Krzysztof Franaszek shared new posts that had been recommended to his YouTube homepage. These included “Sinners” in French, new episodes of “Love Island” ripped from Peacock and “Squid Game: Season 3” in English, which racked up more than 1 million views before it was deleted. The account had 76,000 subscribers and just that one video.
But perhaps the most frustrating part about all this, the agency buyer said, is that the burner account he’s been using to run tests is now being served brand lift surveys to gauge which movies he’d heard of and plans to see.
YouTube, he said, is “reselling” these users to the studios and broadcasters as prime movie-going audiences.
In an ironic twist, he said studios are “paying for the privilege” to target and measure the sentiment of viewers who watch those films for free on YouTube.