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Making Millions by Distributing Pirated Movies
- tmaly 9y agoWho pays for the video storage and streaming costs? The same person with the site?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ceejayoz 9y agoThere's a section titled "Streaming and Hosting Affiliation" in the article that answers that. Fly-by-night file hosts that pay for hits and serve a billion malware popups to visitors.
- chrishacken 9y agoBased on what he wrote, it seems like he's just guessing and doesn't actually know where this stuff is hosted.
- BoorishBears 9y agoAn anecdote but I've seen exactly that. Sites that stream foreign films that you can't buy using hosts that will open 10 tabs of ads the moment you click on a video, weird redirects, and a bunch of user-hostile stuff. Usually I go to the network tab and pull a direct stream to the file hosted, but some even go as far as streaming using specialized clients that chop up the video and apply encryption (which I assume is easy to defeat but not worth the hassle when the whole point is to avoid the hassle of ads)
- user5994461 9y agoWhat you describe looks like the other type of shady sites. The ones that don't have any content, they just redirect you between fake pages and websites indefinitely. Sometimes it will ask to subscribe with your card or install a streaming software (always a malware). It's all a scam, there is nothing to watch.
- user5994461 9y agoAuthor here. The list is the first paragraph of the section, there is no guessing.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sandworm101 9y agoExcept that some of them (rapidgator, keep2share, mega, ul.to etc) have legs. They've been around a while now and dont use ads, at least not ads that arent easily blocked by 99% of users. They are shady, but thepiratebay is still a thing. Being shady doesnt mean you are unreliable or your existance fleeting.
- mschuster91 9y agotpb could for what its worth run from aws free tiers. The site is, with the exception of search, entirely do-able static html. It doesn't cost much money to operate, only thing you need is solid provider for hosting and a couple hundred grands for lawyers...
- user5994461 9y agoThat's doubly wrong. The sites cycled between subscriptions and ads, historically. None has been around for a full decade in the same form.
- vernie 9y agoOn other sites I've seen they usually rely on a list of mirrors across several free video hosting sites that get cycled out as takedowns are issued. I've even seen some use Google Drive to host movies.
- j_s 9y agoPerhaps not millions, but some charge money to host the torrenting and then streaming of the resulting files. https://alternativeto.net/software/bitport-io/ https://alternativeto.net/software/bitport-io/
- RileyJames 9y agoSelling traffic via background pop ups is a common method for streaming sites to make money, likely they kick back some of this revenue to feeder sites like the one mentioned. See here: https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/porn-runs-the-internet https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/porn-runs-the-intern... Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15915564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15915564
- craftyguy 9y agoI hate pop-unders (background popups, whatever you want to call them) with a passion. When a website I visit spawns one, I immediately blacklist the entire domain. It's a losing battle through.
- ascom 9y agouBlock Origin is your friend.
- skc 9y agoI still don't understand why browser makers can't make this sort of interactivity impossible to implement. I can't think of a single good use-case for pop-unders (or pop-ups even)
- jedberg 9y agoThere two good use cases I can think of. When you do a captive portal with some sort of timer (hotel, airplane, etc), they will sometimes do a pop under with a timer that has the option to pay more to renew. That can be slightly useful. Or when you visit a site, and it does a pop under of a survey about that site. Then you see it when you close the window and maybe fill out the survey. That one is less useful but at least legit.
- dmitriid 9y agoOh wow. So piracy. Such millions. Here's a novel idea that will let you win those "lost" millions back: provide a legitimate service that beats pirate sites at: - content can be easily found - content can be easily viewed - no arbitary restrictions (oh, you are watching from Sweden? Oh, you only get a downsampled version with baked in subtitles covering half of the screen etc.) Update: Relevant Oatmeal comic http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
- raphar 9y agoyou forgot to negotiate an agreement with EACH copyright holder!
- rurban 9y agoExactly. Tried that. Not possible. Not as movie theater, not as TV streaming company. They just don't care if you are not big enough.
- Zekio 9y agobaked in subtitles is such a pain, I would totally use the windows store to rent movies if not for the fact they bake in subtitles which makes it unwatchable since I don't read them and they are so often incorrect translations..
- turc1656 9y agoThat comic is on point.
- sverhagen 9y agoAfter reading discussions on this for years, I feel now that only a small part of piraters would now still go for that. A lot of them would argue that the price point is still wrong, or whatever restrictions are left are still unreasonable.
- dmitriid 9y agoNetflix's rise to be the king of streaming is directly related to viewers opting in for the ease of use and safety of Netflix (similar thing happened with Steam: it squashed piracy into nothingness even in countries like Russia). Now that you will have to pay for Netflix, and HBO, and Disney, and Amazon Prime, and Hulu (I think they have exclusive deals), and that a lot of this content will not be available in non-US markets, the pirate sites will see a rise again.
- rammy1234 9y ago"Did you know that Google pay cash for every new installation of Google Chrome? Yes, they do." , Is it for real ?
- throwaway1892 9y agoYes, they are paying software creators to add a chrome install in the installer, usually with a checkbox that's enabled by default. I remember the creator of VLC saying that refusing Google's offer was the hardest decision he's taken, so the money offered must be good.
- kuschku 9y agoYes, it is. It’s how Google managed to get so much marketshare so quickly. The VLC lead dev (Jean-Baptiste Kaempf) said they offered him over 30 million EUR for secretly shipping Chrome with the VLC installer/updater. Many other projects, from Piriform’s CCleaner to adware also ship Chrome for the same reasons.
- dumbfounder 9y agoI don't think reputable ad networks would advertise on pirate sites. The disreputable ones don't get you $2 cpms. Period. I think he is off by at least an order of magnitude, maybe more. Source: I run twicsy.com, which major networks avoid because of nsfw content, and only get about 12 cent RPM (revenue per page per 1000).
- elorant 9y agoTry reading the story about Methbot.
- dumbfounder 9y agoDefinitely interesting stuff, but it is a different scheme that involves hundreds or thousands of sites. We are talking about a single insanely high volume site and that makes a big difference.
- raphar 9y agounrelated. Can you tell the bandwidth of your site? (or its approximate magnitude)
- dumbfounder 9y agoIt's not tremendously high because I don't host the images. It is very roughly 500gb per day. (I get a TON of bot traffic)
- raphar 9y agoWow, thats not a bandwidth to host from aws! thanx!
- ryan-c 9y agoThey absolutely do, they just don't realize. There are a lot of schemes for "laundering" where the ad ran. Aside from popunder/redirect shenanigans that were covered in the press recently, they can iframe a "legit" site (that they control or partner with) which then runs the ad. They may or may not bother to actually arrange the ad to be visible.
- revelation 9y agoNetflix is at 9 billion, this is a million with some optimistic numbers on CPM. If piracy is about making money then it seems to be a bad business to be in.
- LV-426 9y agoGiven the state of the front page/s of HN now, and lately, I expected the answer to be coin-hive or some other crypto-currency related thing. Instead the answer is simply the rather more mundane "advertising".
- user5994461 9y agoDon't forget affiliations and subscriptions. At the height of their time, the likes of rapidshare/megavideo used to pay a lot.
- LV-426 9y agoI've heard that some forums which are dedicated to linking to copyright violations are owned by the file hosting site they use for the files.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- qwerty456127 9y agoThe problem with legal movies are DRM, vendor/device lock-in, forced ads, regional policies etc. You can just download a pirated movie as a plain MP4/MKV/AVI file in the language you want (not necessarily the official language of your region) and the quality you want (some people like 30+ gib HDs, many prefer 5 of less gib per movie) and play it forever everywhere, including unsupported platforms (namely huge number of TVs and no-name set-top-boxes with USB ports, old PCs with exotic OSes etc). This (besides visiting cinemas, these 2 things don't really affect each other, people often do both for the same movie) is what almost everybody does in the eastern Europe. People don't really mind to pay some bucks for a movie/song/book/etc. but nobody in sane mind wants the crap I've mentioned in the first paragraph. Sell plain DRM-free standard-format multilingual downloadable files for humble prices (under $5 per movie) and you'll have almost all the audience pirate sites attract.
- CodeMage 9y ago> as a plain MP4/MKV/AVI file in the language you want (not necessarily the official language of your region) Not to mention being able to download subtitles in almost any language there is and then play the movie with those subtitles. That's one of those things that drive me crazy about Netflix, Amazon Instant Video and such: there's a ton of movies I can't watch with my wife because her English isn't good enough yet.
- denzil_correa 9y ago> That's one of those things that drive me crazy about Netflix, Amazon Instant Video and such: there's a ton of movies I can't watch with my wife because her English isn't good enough yet. I will tell you something more crazy about Amazon Prime. You will have an English movie available in the German catalogue but only in German (dubbed). You won't get the English version. I'd like to meet the geniuses who came up with these ideas.
- ssijak 9y agoYou know what is more crazy. Having most of the movies in the movie theaters dubbed to the local language. I for the love of god can`t understand why people prefer to watch those lame versions and not with the original actor audio/voice. Especially when some guy is doing voice overs for several actors. It hurts my brain so badly I can`t watch it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- denisehilton 9y agoOf course it's about making money. If authorities really want to put a stop to this they should ban ad networks that provide monetizing options to these websites. It's much easier than hunting thousands of such websites going live everyday.
- polkathrowaway 9y agoI know of a few teenagers who do this. Their sites have been taken down multiple times, but they never seem to stop. I completely understand that internet forums are no place for seeking legal advice, but I would like to know what can I do to thwart/report these people (in the United States). (My real concern is that the money they are generating is being used to fund illegal activities in the neighborhood -- which I can not tolerate. I have lost a close one to a drug crisis already, cannot take it more).
- groby_b 9y agoTalk to your government about their drug policies enacted at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry. That's a much bigger problem than the teenagers in your industry.[1] Of course, that'll also mean actually getting out the corrupt autocrats currently in charge. So... get politically engaged. (And by that I mean, do real work. Posting on social media is not getting politically engaged. Get out. Organize. Hold your politicians accountable. Run yourself.) Going after the teens in your neighborhood might feel more satisfying, but the drug problem is a systemic problem. It's not caused by a few teens, it won't be fixed by locking up a few teens. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/investigations/dea-drug-industry-congress/?utm_term=.34c660a4fc92 https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/investigations/...
- NegativeK 9y agoIf someone says that they're trying to deal with local drug deaths, telling them that their local problems aren't worth their time isn't the right answer.
- groby_b 9y agoIt's convenient to have a local scapegoat. It feels good to inflict pain on people you perceive as the guilty party. I certainly understand that. I've lost more than one friend. But that convenience has brought us to where we are right now. If we continue to close our eyes to reality, preferring to go after scapegoats, guess what - nothing is going to change. We need to channel our anger into more productive channels. You don't solve a systemic problem by attacking symptoms.
- giarc 9y agoI don't understand this section. >What’s so special about this site? They made one mistake. They opened some of their analytics statistics in the period 2014-2015, probably not something they intended to do. Does the author mean they made available their stats for the period of 2014-2015? The last sentence seems to imply it was a mistake? I'm not sure how the author got access to the page view data.
- user5994461 9y agoYes, the statistics were available publicly for a short while.
- kapad 9y agoI want to add that I subscribe to Netflix, prime and some HBO content via a local partnership in my country but still regularly watch pirated copies of content available via my subscriptions for the following two reasons. 1. Netflix/prime/hotstar(HBO) content is often not in HD while the pirated content I stream is always HD. 2. Pirated sites give me a kind of federated search/browsing for all the content in one place. The second point I fell is key and will remain even after the subscription services have improved their CDNs near where I live.
- lunulata 9y agoIt's super ironic how many ads "attack your mind and computer" on your site. You must have like 10 ads on this one blog post... hypocrisy is a tricky bitch.
- user5994461 9y agoThere is one banner on the bottom that's added by WordPress. Maybe in you meant 10 in binary?
- t3ra 9y agoThere are a few things you forgot $2 CPM!! That's not even close to what shitty ad networks pay. Majority of traffic comes from countries with < 5 cent CPM HOSTING COST It's not just about running a wordpress website here. Most decent site run auto uploaders which need decent size seedboxes. Easily hovering around a thousand dollars Sources/runners: If its a scene pre-d site you need access to some runners. Scene access isn't cheap Changing Domains & black hat seo: These sites are constantly loosing domains and almost all google ranking ones are using black hat seo to get their ranking. Usually means paying someone to do the dirty work. -- Some revenue streams you missed - Pay Per Link (aka locked/paid link shortner) things like AdFly - Background Crypto miners (becoming rather popular on streaming sites) -'FTP ACCESS' / paid subscriptions Still millions? Not by a long shot.. Few thousands.. Probably yes
- user5994461 9y agoIt's really just about running a wordpress site. My blog is a wordpress so I'm pretty familiar with it. Just need a good theme. It couldn't be further from being a scene site. The content is limited and most of it is published late compared to some other sources available. AdFly is a mix of pay per view and pay per click. Didn't think it was worth a specific category but why not. Crypto is a new thing, that certainly wasn't available a year ago. That's a very interesting point though, shady sites will probably be the first ones to have a good use for it.
- TheYcMaster 9y agoCome'on..they are nothing compared to the massive volume of money the producers are earning with streaming services and cinema ticket prices. In 2017 we are seeing the average price of 10€ for a 2D film and of 14€ for a 3D one..that is robbery
- CaptSpify 9y agoI've said this before on HN, but we really need to get away from the idea that distribution is hard. Distribution is basically a Solved Problem. We don't need gatekeepers telling people what they are and aren't allowed to consume. What we do need is better economic models that allow the creators to get paid. People are clearly willing to pay for content, but I don't know of anyone who wants studios/companies/lawyers/etc to get the money rather than the artists themselves. This old world way of thinking about content funding really needs to die off already.
- tfha 9y agoWhat's hard is distribution without allowing redistribution, which is what traditional companies consider a mandatory prerequisite for distribution
- CaptSpify 9y agoAnd that's what I mean. It's stupid that disallowing redistribution is even a concept. We have data that can immediately be duplicated infinitely for free, why should anyone be barred from re-distributing it?
- turc1656 9y agoBecause property rights exist to allow the owners of intellectual property a wide ability to legally control the (re)distribution, ownership, and/or licensing of their creation.
- CaptSpify 9y agoAnd that made sense back when distribution and funding the creators was hard. That is no longer the case today.
- turc1656 9y agoMy point was more that it's not the issue of difficulty or whether or not it could be done, but rather that each property holder has different wishes, and many times their wishes don't conform to the model which you are suggesting. They don't really seem to want a consume-all-you-want because that hasn't proven to be able to replace the income from the classic distribution chain. Look at Spotify as an example.