6 ms·

Going back to enjoying the off-the records millions made by putting shady ads on thepiratebay.se for 10+ years. I seriously have a very hard time time to under

Going back to enjoying the off-the records millions made by putting shady ads on thepiratebay.se for 10+ years. I seriously have a very hard time time to understand the widespread sympathy for this gang. If they would have gone without ads, sure.

adamnemecek 12y ago
Running servers costs money. And IIRC they were actually losing money even with the ads.
- film42 12y ago
  > Although Sunde did not provide Ars with specific financial details regarding The Pirate Bay's operational expenses, he did argue that the site's high bandwidth, power, and hardware costs eliminate the potential for profit. The Pirate Bay, he says, may ultimately be operating at a loss. Source: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/02/pirate-bay-big-revenue-claims-fabricated-by-prosecutors/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/02/pirate-bay-big-re...
  - zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
    Not making money doing something illegal doesn't make it any more legal.
    - Nyr 12y ago
      Not making money makes it legal in Spain and Hungary for example. US law doesn't rule the world.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - MacsHeadroom 12y ago
      Something being illegal doesn't make it unethical or morally wrong.
  - PhasmaFelis 12y ago
    I'm generally in favor of TPB, but "may be operating at a loss"? How the hell do you not know if your bottom line is going up or down? This sounds fishy to me.
    - film42 12y ago
      I think when you're in that line of business, your entire infrastructure could be taken from you at any moment. That could make knowing your financials kind of difficult. Edit: Why the downvotes?
      - biot 12y ago
        At a first approximation, your hosting costs are very obvious: you get a monthly invoice from your hosting provider. If you use multiple providers, add them up. If you use a CDN, add that in too. Very simple. Whether or not your infrastructure will be seized changes nothing about the fact that they are receiving regular invoices for the services they consume. Revenues are similarly easy to calculate: add up all the payments received by whatever ad networks, affiliate programs, partnerships, and so on they use. Some may pay weekly, some monthly, some quarterly... whatever. But it should be trivial to add these up over the course of a 3 month, 6 month, or 1 year period. Any competent 10 year old should be able to take the revenue and expense information and calculate a net profit or loss. Barring that, anybody in the same position should at the very least be able to consider whether the statement "I regularly dip into my personal savings to pay for the site's operations" rings true for them or if they never had to do that. If the revenue and expenses were co-mingled with their personal bank accounts, it should be easy to separate out other sources of revenue and look at income vs. expense from site operations.
        pluma 12y ago
        True, but you're assuming they were even remotely systematic about their book keeping. Depending on how much their income did fluctuate and how irregular their expenses might have been (especially if you consider "one time" expenses like hardware with an indeterminate life expectancy) and if you then consider that they likely had their hand in the cookie jar while also throwing "their own" money back in when they needed to, it can be a huge ball of mud. You could determine the total loss/gain by adding up the business-related expenses and income, but that assumes they were interested in doing so. I'm sure they had at least a general idea of how well they were doing "right now" (i.e. assuming no catastrophic hardware failures or drastic changes in revenue, etc), but unless they were certain they weren't making much money (or even operating at a loss), they had no incentive to put their exact net profit/loss into clear terms. Considering how easy it is to burn large sums of money without really being aware of where it all went, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt that they actually didn't know if they made a ton of money. But I'm fairly certain they knew the general direction they had been heading well enough not to be honest about the specifics.
  - danielki 12y ago
    To be fair, if his answer was "yeah, we made millions", there would be more than a small handful of entities trying to seize those assets.
  - baby 12y ago
    I don't believe any of this, they have a very optimized website that only serves text and ads. Even one small server could handle the traffic.
    - fredsted 12y ago
      Don't forget it has a comments system and tracks the peers of 6 million torrents.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
- rhino369 12y ago
  I don't believe that.
- johansch 12y ago
  That's all their claims. They were not able to show that they were losing or making money in court. There were no records, at all. However, they would have to been incredibly incompetent not to make millions off the advertisment, based on their amount of traffic. This was key in the procedings. I mean.. right now thepiratebay.se is at top 90 in the alexa ranking. More traffic than e.g. nytimes.com, ebay.co.uk, redtube.com, dailymail.co.uk, etc etc. Meanwhile, the hosting cost for this service is comparatively extremely small. Saw some list recently of 20 servers. Perhaps true, but seems inefficient. Still, at that level, peanuts compared to the ad revenue.
  - dwild 12y ago
    The issue is the provenance of the ads, there's way more ad publisher interested in nytimes, ebay, etc... it's even worse when you consider that people that surf piratebay probably use an ad blocker or won't be interested to buy any product. I have an hard time though to believe they would be losing money. How could they afford to keep it online at that scale if they had to use their own money.
    - johansch 12y ago
      How does pornhub.com make money?
      - sp332 12y ago
        Well, they have a higher Alexa ranking than the Pirate Bay, so it's probably easier for them to get advertisers. Also they're a near-monopoly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindGeek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindGeek On top of that, while porn may be objectionable to some advertisers' brands, it's still worlds better than the straight-up illegal content on the Pirate Bay.
      - dwild 12y ago
        There's a potential paying customer on a pornographic website, there's none on a illegal torrent tracker (or at least, there's less). There's always the possibility to advertise or sell live stream, access to other pornographic website, etc... You never saw any pornographic ads on Pirate Bay? That's mostly the ads that I saw the last time I went there, but I wasn't searching for porn at all. I'm pretty sure though that people that goes to pornhub want porn, so theses ads should generate more profit on pornhub than on Pirate Bay. We could also talk about brand association, etc... but I hope you already understood how it's easier to make money out of porn comparatively to illegal torrent tracker.
- dwild 12y ago
  I can believe they weren't making much but I have an hard time believing they were actually losing money. At that scale, if they were losing any money, it would be way more than they could afford to.
- tedks 12y ago
  When did they stop hosting .torrent files? Hosting only magnet links means they have nearly nil bandwidth costs (just some sparse HTML pages, by far the biggest piece of content on a tpb results page are the ads) and require very little infrastructure. In contrast, they have banners on the results page, pop-ups when you interact on the results pages, and massive banners on the item pages. A good chunk of their clientèle hopefully runs adblock, and I also can't imagine the ads they're serving are very lucrative since few legitimate companies will want to do business with them, but I can't imagine that it balances out.
  - benologist 12y ago
    You missed the affiliate links - they also peddle crapware for $$$, in addition to the ads and popups that might be blocked. Even if 1/2 their traffic is using adblockers that still leaves billions of ad impressions a month. There is no reason to believe their lies about how much servers cost, especially on a site like HN where many people have first hand experience of more elaborate hosting costs and advertising. 2009 = 1b pageviews/month https://gigaom.com/2009/07/19/the-pirate-bay-distributing-the-worlds-entertainment-for-3000-a-month/ https://gigaom.com/2009/07/19/the-pirate-bay-distributing-th... 2014 = 90th most popular website on the entire internet, which itself grew massively in that 5 years
    - zanny 12y ago
      On the flipside, I cannot imagine clickthrough rates and impressions that lead to purchases is high on a site that markets itself as a place to pirate digital content even for those not using adblock. And the nature of the site can deter larger advertisers from using it. I'm not saying they made no money, but I doubt it would have been as lucrative as if those page views were dedicated to, say, www.wickerbaskets.com or something else.
      - benologist 12y ago
        They don't have any shortage of advertisers so there is obviously demand for the space = companies paying for it. There are also piracy-complementary services that seem to be popular in the ads like VPN and privacy stuff, seed boxes, torrent clients etc that people do pay for.
achamayou 12y ago
Aren't everyone's taxes and incomes meant to be public in Sweden ? Assuming he did file his taxes properly, this should be verifiable.
- johansch 12y ago
  Since they ran a multi-million dollar business for like ten years without "having any idea of how much money the ads brought in" (as stated over and over in the court proceedings) that is a pretty big assumption you made just there.
  - achamayou 12y ago
    I would have thought that court might have looked into this, and possibly added to the charges in consequence, but the coverage I can find doesn't mention it at all.
    - johansch 12y ago
      It was (rightfully) a pretty large part of the reasoning behind the ruling. But 99% of the internet fanboys/fangirls have no idea of this.
    - benologist 12y ago
      They've always covered their money trail, it's been a critical part of the illusion they portray where they're good people doing good things for nothing. Given that the rest of the internet at their popularity level manages to generate enough $$$ to cover thousands of employees, produce their own whatever etc, it's ludicrous to expect TPB's traffic to 'cover hosting' as is the popular rumor. A similar site, SurfTheChannel, was found to be generating ~$78,000 per month with order(s) of magnitude less traffic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfthechannel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfthechannel
    - Erwin 12y ago
      At least in Denmark, not paying e.g. $1 million in tax and especially if it's clear you didn't forget but conspired to avoid tax could be a far longer prison sentence than what this guy got away with. It's surprising this was not mentioned given the Scandinavian credit card operations where foreign credit card heavily used in the country were scanned to see if they belonged to not tourists but tax evaders.
johansch 12y ago
TIL: HN is no better than reddit. Truth is downvoted here as well.
- cpach 12y ago
  Can you prove that brokep is a millionaire? If not, how can you call it ”truth”?
- zanny 12y ago
  Personally I hope hes rich, They did not invent torrents, they did little to improve the market for them directly, but they have provided something valuable in making one of the most takedown resistant sites on the Internet. That kind of technological exploration is incredibly valuable, and they provide a service a lot of people wanted, and it makes sense to profit off that if you can.

adamnemecek 12y ago

Running servers costs money. And IIRC they were actually losing money even with the ads.

film42 12y ago
> Although Sunde did not provide Ars with specific financial details regarding The Pirate Bay's operational expenses, he did argue that the site's high bandwidth, power, and hardware costs eliminate the potential for profit. The Pirate Bay, he says, may ultimately be operating at a loss. Source: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/02/pirate-bay-big-revenue-claims-fabricated-by-prosecutors/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/02/pirate-bay-big-re...
- zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
  Not making money doing something illegal doesn't make it any more legal.
  - Nyr 12y ago
    Not making money makes it legal in Spain and Hungary for example. US law doesn't rule the world.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - MacsHeadroom 12y ago
    Something being illegal doesn't make it unethical or morally wrong.
- PhasmaFelis 12y ago
  I'm generally in favor of TPB, but "may be operating at a loss"? How the hell do you not know if your bottom line is going up or down? This sounds fishy to me.
  - film42 12y ago
    I think when you're in that line of business, your entire infrastructure could be taken from you at any moment. That could make knowing your financials kind of difficult. Edit: Why the downvotes?
    - biot 12y ago
      At a first approximation, your hosting costs are very obvious: you get a monthly invoice from your hosting provider. If you use multiple providers, add them up. If you use a CDN, add that in too. Very simple. Whether or not your infrastructure will be seized changes nothing about the fact that they are receiving regular invoices for the services they consume. Revenues are similarly easy to calculate: add up all the payments received by whatever ad networks, affiliate programs, partnerships, and so on they use. Some may pay weekly, some monthly, some quarterly... whatever. But it should be trivial to add these up over the course of a 3 month, 6 month, or 1 year period. Any competent 10 year old should be able to take the revenue and expense information and calculate a net profit or loss. Barring that, anybody in the same position should at the very least be able to consider whether the statement "I regularly dip into my personal savings to pay for the site's operations" rings true for them or if they never had to do that. If the revenue and expenses were co-mingled with their personal bank accounts, it should be easy to separate out other sources of revenue and look at income vs. expense from site operations.
      - pluma 12y ago
        True, but you're assuming they were even remotely systematic about their book keeping. Depending on how much their income did fluctuate and how irregular their expenses might have been (especially if you consider "one time" expenses like hardware with an indeterminate life expectancy) and if you then consider that they likely had their hand in the cookie jar while also throwing "their own" money back in when they needed to, it can be a huge ball of mud. You could determine the total loss/gain by adding up the business-related expenses and income, but that assumes they were interested in doing so. I'm sure they had at least a general idea of how well they were doing "right now" (i.e. assuming no catastrophic hardware failures or drastic changes in revenue, etc), but unless they were certain they weren't making much money (or even operating at a loss), they had no incentive to put their exact net profit/loss into clear terms. Considering how easy it is to burn large sums of money without really being aware of where it all went, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt that they actually didn't know if they made a ton of money. But I'm fairly certain they knew the general direction they had been heading well enough not to be honest about the specifics.
- danielki 12y ago
  To be fair, if his answer was "yeah, we made millions", there would be more than a small handful of entities trying to seize those assets.
- baby 12y ago
  I don't believe any of this, they have a very optimized website that only serves text and ads. Even one small server could handle the traffic.
  - fredsted 12y ago
    Don't forget it has a comments system and tracks the peers of 6 million torrents.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
rhino369 12y ago
I don't believe that.
johansch 12y ago
That's all their claims. They were not able to show that they were losing or making money in court. There were no records, at all. However, they would have to been incredibly incompetent not to make millions off the advertisment, based on their amount of traffic. This was key in the procedings. I mean.. right now thepiratebay.se is at top 90 in the alexa ranking. More traffic than e.g. nytimes.com, ebay.co.uk, redtube.com, dailymail.co.uk, etc etc. Meanwhile, the hosting cost for this service is comparatively extremely small. Saw some list recently of 20 servers. Perhaps true, but seems inefficient. Still, at that level, peanuts compared to the ad revenue.
- dwild 12y ago
  The issue is the provenance of the ads, there's way more ad publisher interested in nytimes, ebay, etc... it's even worse when you consider that people that surf piratebay probably use an ad blocker or won't be interested to buy any product. I have an hard time though to believe they would be losing money. How could they afford to keep it online at that scale if they had to use their own money.
  - johansch 12y ago
    How does pornhub.com make money?
    - sp332 12y ago
      Well, they have a higher Alexa ranking than the Pirate Bay, so it's probably easier for them to get advertisers. Also they're a near-monopoly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindGeek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindGeek On top of that, while porn may be objectionable to some advertisers' brands, it's still worlds better than the straight-up illegal content on the Pirate Bay.
    - dwild 12y ago
      There's a potential paying customer on a pornographic website, there's none on a illegal torrent tracker (or at least, there's less). There's always the possibility to advertise or sell live stream, access to other pornographic website, etc... You never saw any pornographic ads on Pirate Bay? That's mostly the ads that I saw the last time I went there, but I wasn't searching for porn at all. I'm pretty sure though that people that goes to pornhub want porn, so theses ads should generate more profit on pornhub than on Pirate Bay. We could also talk about brand association, etc... but I hope you already understood how it's easier to make money out of porn comparatively to illegal torrent tracker.
dwild 12y ago
I can believe they weren't making much but I have an hard time believing they were actually losing money. At that scale, if they were losing any money, it would be way more than they could afford to.
tedks 12y ago
When did they stop hosting .torrent files? Hosting only magnet links means they have nearly nil bandwidth costs (just some sparse HTML pages, by far the biggest piece of content on a tpb results page are the ads) and require very little infrastructure. In contrast, they have banners on the results page, pop-ups when you interact on the results pages, and massive banners on the item pages. A good chunk of their clientèle hopefully runs adblock, and I also can't imagine the ads they're serving are very lucrative since few legitimate companies will want to do business with them, but I can't imagine that it balances out.
- benologist 12y ago
  You missed the affiliate links - they also peddle crapware for $$$, in addition to the ads and popups that might be blocked. Even if 1/2 their traffic is using adblockers that still leaves billions of ad impressions a month. There is no reason to believe their lies about how much servers cost, especially on a site like HN where many people have first hand experience of more elaborate hosting costs and advertising. 2009 = 1b pageviews/month https://gigaom.com/2009/07/19/the-pirate-bay-distributing-the-worlds-entertainment-for-3000-a-month/ https://gigaom.com/2009/07/19/the-pirate-bay-distributing-th... 2014 = 90th most popular website on the entire internet, which itself grew massively in that 5 years
  - zanny 12y ago
    On the flipside, I cannot imagine clickthrough rates and impressions that lead to purchases is high on a site that markets itself as a place to pirate digital content even for those not using adblock. And the nature of the site can deter larger advertisers from using it. I'm not saying they made no money, but I doubt it would have been as lucrative as if those page views were dedicated to, say, www.wickerbaskets.com or something else.
    - benologist 12y ago
      They don't have any shortage of advertisers so there is obviously demand for the space = companies paying for it. There are also piracy-complementary services that seem to be popular in the ads like VPN and privacy stuff, seed boxes, torrent clients etc that people do pay for.

achamayou 12y ago

Aren't everyone's taxes and incomes meant to be public in Sweden ? Assuming he did file his taxes properly, this should be verifiable.

johansch 12y ago
Since they ran a multi-million dollar business for like ten years without "having any idea of how much money the ads brought in" (as stated over and over in the court proceedings) that is a pretty big assumption you made just there.
- achamayou 12y ago
  I would have thought that court might have looked into this, and possibly added to the charges in consequence, but the coverage I can find doesn't mention it at all.
  - johansch 12y ago
    It was (rightfully) a pretty large part of the reasoning behind the ruling. But 99% of the internet fanboys/fangirls have no idea of this.
  - benologist 12y ago
    They've always covered their money trail, it's been a critical part of the illusion they portray where they're good people doing good things for nothing. Given that the rest of the internet at their popularity level manages to generate enough $$$ to cover thousands of employees, produce their own whatever etc, it's ludicrous to expect TPB's traffic to 'cover hosting' as is the popular rumor. A similar site, SurfTheChannel, was found to be generating ~$78,000 per month with order(s) of magnitude less traffic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfthechannel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfthechannel
  - Erwin 12y ago
    At least in Denmark, not paying e.g. $1 million in tax and especially if it's clear you didn't forget but conspired to avoid tax could be a far longer prison sentence than what this guy got away with. It's surprising this was not mentioned given the Scandinavian credit card operations where foreign credit card heavily used in the country were scanned to see if they belonged to not tourists but tax evaders.

johansch 12y ago

TIL: HN is no better than reddit. Truth is downvoted here as well.

cpach 12y ago
Can you prove that brokep is a millionaire? If not, how can you call it ”truth”?
zanny 12y ago
Personally I hope hes rich, They did not invent torrents, they did little to improve the market for them directly, but they have provided something valuable in making one of the most takedown resistant sites on the Internet. That kind of technological exploration is incredibly valuable, and they provide a service a lot of people wanted, and it makes sense to profit off that if you can.