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One of the world’s most visited websites that nobody is aware of (2017)
- boffinism 8y agoMisleading title. As the article points out, the Alexa ranking puts it outside the top 200k most visited sites.
- SmkyMt 8y agoArticle's author explains: "Unfortunately Alexa doesn’t have intelligence on the amount of visitors for this site." He goes on to describe additional data from informer.com, similarweb.com, etc - and to explain that the site actually strives not to be ranked well - as part of their business model.
- furicane 8y agoYou do realize that if it's in top 10 million, out of estimated ~640 million websites, it's right at the top? It's not misleading at all, it's quite down to the point, just like the article itself.
- hahla 8y agoAlexa is generally a poor metric. In my experience directly comparing Google Analytics to Alexa for hundreds of sites, anything above 50k rank is not pushing meaningful traffic.
- dreamache 8y agoYeah, but that's not like a huge badge of honor. I can build a site and make it hit beyond a 200k alexa within a few months with minimal effort.
- dmos62 8y agoBelow excerpt sums up the "most visited websites" part. Notice the "s" at the end of "websites". It might be an overstatement, the author didn't back it up, unless I missed it, but it's impressive nontheless: > 45 domain names are in active use in 19 different countries. > 42 dedicated servers in Germany run the whole operation. > 24,3 million PDF and PowerPoint files are hosted on all sites combined. > These sites have at least 12.843 incoming links. > 23 to 29 million unique monthly visitors for all the sites combined. > Estimated 100 million page views per month. > The sites generate a roughly estimated add revenue of $92,210 each month. > slideplayer.com is ranked as the 6,047 and myshared.ru is ranked as 11,806 most visited site in the world. 11 other sites are also ranked in the top 100,000 list.
- altizon 8y agoOn info about what the title says.
- shakna 8y ago> According to another source, a public address book at locatefamily.com, someone under the name Vladimir S. Nesterenko is living at [REDACTED] in Moscow. Vladimir lives according to Google Streetview it’s an apartment complex far away from the Moscow city center... Really? Someone investigating with journalists, and may be considered a journalists themselves (?), actually publishes the address of someone that they are accusing of running a scam? There can only be two reasons for doing something like that: a) You're an idiot, and didn't consider the implications. b) You're asking for the public to exact a justice that you think you can't.
- richrichardsson 8y agoI'd go with a). Very dumb move.
- sametmax 8y ago“Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence” said Napoleon.
- yesenadam 8y agoNever ascribe to Napoleon etc. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/12/30/not-malice/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/12/30/not-malice/ TL;DR Seems to have been first attributed to 'Napolean' on Usenet in 1997!
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- bryanrasmussen 8y agoso what would comprise the requirements for an adequate explanation of incompetence in this case?
- Traubenfuchs 8y agoWho in their right mind puts their real whois information online? On my urls, all that's real is the email address. I applaud Vladimir Nesterenko for making money like this.
- whatshisface 8y agoThere's no telling whether or not that's his real name. Edit: as a commenter below pointed out, just because a person with a name lives at an address, they may not run a website that they're listed as running. After all you probably live at an address, and if I was a fraudster I could list you.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 8y agoExcept that if you read the article the reporters confirmed that a guy by that name lived at that apartment complex by asking the neighbors. There’s no guarantee that the person who registered is actually the person who lives there but someone answers to that name at the address provided apparently.
- prepend 8y agoAgain, I wouldn’t be so sure. It’s a useful practice to use real people’s info for precisely situations like this. Step 1) register foo.com Step 2) make email address John.doe@foo.com Step 3) register bar.com using John.doe@foo.com as contact info. Include contact info for John Doe with a real address and random phone number This meets Whois requirements and makes it a bit harder for any real lookups. It’s easier than providing wholly fake info because journalists will Lee dogging. When journalists contact John Doe who denies owning bar.com then they will work it like an uncooperative subject.
- Traubenfuchs 8y ago> Whois requirements Are there any? My street name is literally "private" and my phone number "000..." or something like that.
- dTal 8y agoWow, the title doesn't do this justice. "Google makes millions from Russian organized crime" might be better.
- bitcoinmoney 8y agoDid the Russian make money too??
- jrobn 8y agoIn taxes maybe?
- jerf 8y ago"Organized" usually implies a, well, organization. This seems like it may be just one guy. I don't see anything about this site that would particularly require an "organization".
- zandjager 8y ago"Seems like it may be just one guy." One cannot make this statement weaker. We don't know and we cannot know now whether it is just one guy.
- stackola 8y agoIt's very well possible though, so jumping to "organized crime" is also a stretch
- jessaustin 8y agoIt's a well-known logical principle: always assume Russian organized crime!
- stevespang 8y agoEXACTLY.
- rcdwealth 8y agoThe guy would do the same, but he cannot even dream of that income. Report loaded with envy have no place on my list. Let the Russian live.
- intea 8y agoMirror (March '18): https://web.archive.org/web/20180328023025/https://sijmen.ruwhof.net/weblog/1623-one-of-the-worlds-most-visited-websites-that-nobody-is-aware-of https://web.archive.org/web/20180328023025/https://sijmen.ru...
- EMRZ 8y agoSorry if i don't understand this totally, but why is scraping for pdf and ppt/pptx files and mirroring them illegal? If you can reach that files just scraping it means they are somehow open to public access. No joke, i am genuinely asking.
- consp 8y agoScraping, mostly no. Using them to make profit: yes. Since you then violate the copyright of the author as the original action was solely to make it public (assuming no profit was intended). edit: Rehosting is not allowed as far as I know in Dutch law if you are attempting to make profit of it by not requesting it from the original owner. Rehosting it and not taking advantage and linking to the original article is allowed as far as I know. But maybe ask your lawyer for info if you really want to know.
- jerrre 8y agoNAL but I'd say the profit is not the problem. Rehosting it (also without credit) is.
- ForHackernews 8y agoHuh? IANAL, but that doesn't correspond to my understanding of copyright laws.
- prepend 8y agoIf a file is available through non-auth http it’s unclear what the copyright is. I think it depends on the particular item whether copyright was violated. Making a file public without restriction doesn’t mean another can’t make profit (my ISP makes a profit by transmitting the file to me; gmail makes profit when I email the file to me; google makes a profit when they cache the file; archive makes a profit when they archive a file; etc etc). I think if this were non-public docs then the case is clearer. But by releasing a document publicly with unlimited access via URL the author explicitly allows unlimited distribution (and due to the nature of tcp/ip redistribution). If an author wants to restrict distribution then they should restrict distribution using available protocols.
- hahla 8y agoI read through the article and I’m baffled. I couldn’t watch the news video or understand what was going on at the bottom of the post... but were news outlets and the government involved for a site that’s skimming PDFs, hosting them and then slapping on ads? This isn’t something new and if I recall correctly SlideShare did the same thing to grow to where they are today. Is it legal, I don’t know, but these types of sites are dime a dozen and nothing new..
- roozbeh18 8y agoI was thinking the same. It was hard to understand the conclusion of what happened at the end.The news video was not playable either.
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- ericabiz 8y agoFrom the article: "Multiple tax files of Dutch citizens had been published via www.docplayer.nl" I don't speak or read Dutch, so I couldn't watch the video clip, but my guess is these tax files contained important and sensitive information. They were probably scraped from a government website.
- zandjager 8y agoThey probably did, but someone made the mistake to put them somewhere where they were publicly available. Also the "russian" made tools available for taking down the content, tools which according to the article were working in an effective and timely manner.
- aasasd 8y agoThere are hundreds of "sharing" sites for every kind of thing that you'd want to find on the web, all copycats with the exact same idea. MP3s, tech manuals, etc. They're more popular in developing countries, I guess because we're used to piracy from the 2000s. The figure of 92 K$/mon is pulled out of thin air, and a person earning that probably wouldn't live in a two-room apt on the outskirts. (Not saying that they found the right guy, though.)
- sheeshkebab 8y agoIs this some kind of political prep piece for passing legislation in Europe against google, internet archive, and other search engines indexing public content?
- zhte415 8y agoFrom the article > an empire that makes a million dollar a year by illegally hosting 24.3 million files copied from other sites That's quite an interesting stat: that 24.3 carrots can be thrown on the web, made hard to download, and a dollar can be earned.
- empath75 8y agoYouTube was full of pirated content when it started too. I don’t really see what he’s doing wrong.
- justin66 8y agoYouTube was full of pirated content when I looked at it this morning...
- jrobn 8y agoHere is the real question everybody should ask themselves: In today’s world, Why do I try to work honestly for a dollar?
- raffomania 8y agoFor one thing, you might not want to risk being in jail.
- PavlovsCat 8y agoFor my own sake. > Of course it is "more useful" to perpetrate than to suffer injustice, but for the sake of the thinking dialogue with myself this utilitarian standpoint has to be given up." > Natürlich ist es "nützlicher", Unrecht zu tun als Unrecht zu leiden; um des denkenden Dialogs mit mir selbst willen muss gerade dieser Nützlichkeitsstandpunkt aufgegeben werden. -- Hannah Arendt, "Wahrheit und Politik"
- mikestew 8y agoIt's a great question, and the true answer isn't necessarily the default the (somewhat) rhetorical question assumes. Personally, an honest life is more important to me than money. OTOH, that's easy to say living on/with a software engineer's salary and job prospects.
- JeanMarcS 8y agoExtracted from a (french) song and roughly translated : In life, son, you have two choices : you work or make money
- emptybits 8y agoIt's a very important question. IMO we should be most mindful of our work and moneymaking since we spend most of our waking life doing these things. When we are dishonest in our moneymaking, we are probably creating unnecessary suffering for others. That's enough reason for some. IMO it also feels easier to love and be loved (e.g. by friends, family, your children, etc.) if you are honest in your dealings with others.
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- dangero 8y agoI wonder if this article ended up improving search ranking and revenues for the creator. Another form of automated seo generation I see is youtube users that scrape images and 3rd party news articles then convert them into a video with a slide show and overlayed text to speech. Curious what their ad revenue looks like. I assume a bot does all the work and creates thousands of videos using that approach per day.
- phkahler 8y agoIANAL but it seem a good idea to put a copyright notice on all documents. One can hope a site like this doesn't scrape docs with copyright notices, but if they do it anyway wouldn't you have a better case to sue for damages.
- arbuge 8y agoThe upload buttons of those sites seem to be there mainly to create plausible deniability. If any content creates trouble which cannot be made to easily go away just by taking it down, the site owners can claim they did not upload it themselves and that they don't have any records of who did. Or they could also create fake upload records if they want to stretch things a bit further. In practice, I think it's a very safe bet that 99.999999% of the documents on those sites have been obtained through scraping other sites, and are not user-submitted content.
- 55555 8y agoThe ad revenue estimate could be off by as much as an order of magnitude. This is a non-story. There are millions of spam websites on the internet.
- desdiv 8y agoUnlike most spam websites, this one actually provides a useful and helpful function. The next time I 404 on a PDF I'll be sure to search for it on this site.
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y agoSeriously, how long has he been online as an "ethical hacker"? For everyone who has the experience of looking for some texts should know that there are millions of this type of websites out there, the spam farms. Many of these sites don't even have the files (a common tactic is putting the links to your spamsite in a PDF, and name the PDF as some other documents people are looking for but you don't actually have, to disguise your spam as a file, polluting the search result for everyone, bastard!), and are just making the visitors to click ads, or scamming people to enter personal information, to pay for another related service or a premium account, and they can probably make more money. And some other websites are even distributing malicious software. Meanwhile this website is actually an "honest" one that works for the visitors as advertised! I think it would be great injustice by selectively just enforcing the copyright laws by seizing this individual websites and its income. After all, 30% of the websites on the entire Internet are like this. I don't think the blog post really have a point.
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoThis one is a little different. There's the blatant, willful copyright violation. And misrepresenting the doc authors as endorsing this website.
- intralizee 8y agoThe site is nice. I can search "psychology" view 400 pdfs. Click on one, view the pdf at the top of the browser and with the transcription below. All text of the transcription is google translated when using chrome. It makes me think about how it must be when obtaining financial freedom and just dumping money on viewing whatever you want to read. Except I haven't found a good translator for pdfs, so this transcription is nice on the site. Also most if not all of the Pdfs are not complete and makes me think this site is beneficial to the source publishers.
- 7j 8y agoThe most annoying thing is traffic is comming from google. Lately google search results are full of such low quality results, computer generated text, etc. Same applies also to YT - videos with 2x speed, inverted colors etc.
- vidyesh 8y ago>Same applies also to YT - videos with 2x speed, inverted colors etc. What is this? Can you provide some links to these kind of videos. Thank you.
- woogiewonka 8y agoReady, set, go! Let's see how many scrapers HN readers will build now to try to copy this "business" model.
- mgamache 8y agoThere's more to it then scraping. I would love a deep dive on how he/she was able to get page rank for the sites. Usually these people employ black hat SEO that works for while, but eventually fails when Google updates their ranking algorithm. I always wondered if there are sites that could game the system indefinably. Exactly the kind of info you don't announce on black hat SEO forums.
- jdhawk 8y agoChange your UserAgent to one of Google Bots, and start hitting the pages hosting a PDF. Probably some hints there.
- NKosmatos 8y agoThanks for letting us know about this great "sharing" site :-) Lot's of garbage in it, but it also has some interesting docs. I'm more interested on the technical details of it. How it works internally for scrapping, text extraction, indexing, random users creation and uploading of stuff and so on. I understand the privacy and copyright infringement concerns, but it's not like they've hacked into those other sites and uploaded their files. They're using existing and "open for everyone" pages. Also the estimates for revenue are highly exaggerated IMHO. Sure they're making some €€€, but not in the millions range :-) On a final note, how is this vastly different from, let's say, https://www.scribd.com https://www.scribd.com ?
- mtnGoat 8y agoThis is quite easy to replicate. Just need about 5 jobs that run 24/7 harvesting data.
- holtalanm 8y agothe internet is full of these types of download sites. meh. dude really shouldn't have doxxed him though. we dont even know if the guy in the whois is really the guy behind the site, since you can put anything in there.
- rukshn 8y agoWhoever doing the slideplayer website is doing a damn good SEO. I see more slideplayer links on my Google search everyday than I see SlideShare. I always wondered why slideplayer which is a crappy ad galore website has more content than SlideShare. Very interesting post.
- alanlamm 8y agoThe article does not provide evidence that the users are fake (may well be true, but presumption of innocence applies). If they are not fake, and reports of copyright violation to the platform are duly considered, then it would appear to comply with DMCA in much the same way as Youtube or Facebook do - am I wrong?
- dumbfounder 8y agoIf it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and acts like a duck, then it's probably a duck. But you still need an ornithologist to put that duck in jail. Or something like that.
- myro 8y agoBut wait, earning this money and storing on AdSense account is tricky and there's no such thing like buy bitcoin with adsense balance, right? To be able to withdraw that amount the owner is expected to provide tax information and so on..
- zandjager 8y agoThis is the real question. He could do it legitimately, as google doesn't really care where your income comes from. Hence the implication of google in this story as a party.
- freeflight 8y agoWhy would a Russian individual host his, rather shady, operation in the smack dab middle of Germany, and not somewhere in eastern Europe? Why would an individual like that, who goes through the effort of obfuscating Google analytics code, leave the domain registry information out in the open like that? Imho none of this really adds up, the whole setup seems to be quite complex and sophisticated, I have a hard time believing that anybody who's as clever as that, would screw it all up over the domain registry information.
- jabberthemutt 8y agoClickbait garbage: According to Alexa the site is ranked as the 209,334 most visited site in the world, and the 3,945 most popular site in The Netherlands.
- radus 8y agoYes, but the article makes clear that the content is spread across many different .TLDs (possible reasons for this are offered in the article) which combine for 100 million monthly page-views.
- JeanMarcS 8y agoI was asking myself if the intention is to state that it's one of the website nobody knows most visited one (in the list of website nobody knows) or just pure clickbait. As the first possibility is impossible to nkow (if nobody knows about them...), I agree with you and vote clickbait !
- cosmic_quanta 8y agoThis is a fascinating investigation!
- samstave 8y agoI love how we are kvetching about the legality of rehosting/profiteering/copyright etc and not a single concern for the cancer that ads truly are... I understand the economic lubricant that ads provide to keep many things connected and operating, but its such a one way flow that ads are a syphon more that they are a grout.
- listic 8y ago> His platform is full of PDF files that are copied from other sites and re-hosted. This is illegal Isn't 'illegal' a bit strong term for that?
- aaronmdjones 8y agoNo. An action can be (civilly) illegal without being a crime (i.e. criminally illegal), but it's still illegal nonetheless.
- aidenn0 8y agoAlso, in the US at least, commercial copyright infringement can be criminally illegal.
- wyqydsyq 8y ago> one of the world's most visited sites > According to Alexa the site is ranked as the 209,334 most visited site in the world Clickbait much? I think to be considered "one of the world's most visited" it should at least be in the top 1,000
- Sujan 8y agoAll the visitor data is based on faulty data - there is no connection between the numbers his sources report and reality. If you have your own modestly popular website, go check and see what those sites report for you. Those numbers are totally made up. That of course also means, that the revenue estimate is absolute speculation. Even better: The original question "where did these files come from?" is not even answered.