Tim O'Reilly wrote a post in 2002 titled "Piracy is Progressive Taxation"[0]. Basically, the conclusion he came to after analyzing the data is that on average, piracy stimulates demand enough for net gain in sales for publishers, but it isn't distributed evenly: works in the fat head (eg. bestsellers, blockbusters, etc.) see a very small net loss (ie. for the most popular content piracy may displace sales a bit), but for everyone else it is a net gain, and the gain is bigger the less popular the content is.
[0] https://www.oreilly.com/content/piracy-is-progressive-taxati...
and this is different than "paid influencers" how? oh, well I guess in the former, it's an interested fan, and in the latter it's a known commodity that likely doesn't even like what they're reading/watching.
In my friend group, one dude downloading Into The Spiderverse led to six of us seeing it in theaters.
This is obviously anecdotal, but it's always seemed to me that piracy is almost free advertising in some cases (though obviously not universally.)