Online Pirates love The Grand Tour

It is official. The Grand Tour is the most illegally downloaded show in the history of illegal downloading. Bigger than the Game of Thrones, bigger than House of Cards, and bigger than the previous record holder, Top Gear. Yup, back in the heyday of Top Gear when it was fronted by Clarkson, Hamilton and May, it was a big name in the world of illegal downloads. Now, the trio's follow-up effort is once again top of the pile, although we're sure that they would rather they hadn’t won this particular accolade.

The data comes from the online industry analyst, Muso, and was originally published in the Daily Mail. According to the report, the first show - in which there was a comparison between a LaFerrari, MacLaren and a Porsche 918 Spyder - was illegally downloaded a staggering 7.9 million times, with the second and third shows coming in at 6.4 million and 4.6 million respectively. Chris Elkin of Muso is reported to have claimed that the scale of the illegal downloads were “off the scale in terms of volume” with no show even coming close to the number achieved by The Grand Tour.

There is of course a ‘cost’ to all of this lawlessness in terms of lost revenue alone. Amazon is missing out on at least US$4 million from the UK alone, where 13% of the downloads ended up and as much as US$30 million globally, which is of course quite a pile of beans.