Pirate Bay Is Not Getting Rich from Bitcoin Donations

https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-is-not-getting-rich-from-bitcoin-donations-or-190922/

by wslh • 7 years ago

20 9 7 years ago

rwmurrayVT2• 7 years ago

This should really help readjust the expectations of the "just pay websites directly with tips instead of ads" crowd. TPB is a massive website who's users have to be the ideal adblocking, early adopter, crypto-supporting crowd. If this is what a website can expect then continue to expect adtech to invade your privacy and crash your browsers.

jszymborski• 7 years ago

I think you might want to factor in the fact that when you're going on to TPB, your goal is to get something for nothing.

Add to that the fact that people might feel strange giving donations to TPB for not giving money to the creators whose bits you are downloading.

Finally, I'm pretty sure donating bitcoin to TPB is a good way to get yourself implicated legally. It's non-trivial to launder bitcoins, no matter what the film industry wants you to believe.

eukaryote31• 7 years ago

Nontrivial, yes, but for said crypto-supporting crowd I don't think it would be a stretch to presume that a lot of them are the kind that would know how.

livueta• 7 years ago

An interesting counterexample is the many private trackers that do just fine off of crypto donations. Without naming names I'm personally aware (as in, I can go look at the donation status pages) of at least four that rake in $500+/mo with a small fraction of TPB's usercount.

I think this says more about the type of user who hits up TPB vs. the type of user who has accounts on private trackers - it's probably a reasonable generalization to say that a member of a private tracker has a higher level of tech sophistication, including with cryptocurrencies, than the average TPB visitor. Heck, my boomer relatives use TPB on occasion. Interactions with TPB are also a lot more ephemeral and anonymous - private trackers can give donators a cupcake forum icon or whatever whereas I'm sure 99+% of TPB visitors have never made an account and probably aren't even regular visitors. Similarly, users of private trackers are likely on average significantly more invested in the continued success of the site and therefore more willing to cough up, in contrast to many TPB visitors who probably ended up there via a general search and wouldn't really notice if they were grabbing a torrent from any of the other big public trackers.

So, I think it's fair to say that expectations for certain types of sites - ones that have a low/no barrier to entry, are functionally replaceable units, serve less technically-inclined users, and have a rep for legal sketchiness - need readjusting. Others, especially ones that provide persistent, difficult-to-replace value for users, seem to do ok.

rwmurrayVT2• 7 years ago

Your anecdotal evidence is certainly stark compared to TPB. It just seems bewildering the largest website in the field has such limited donations. They have had multiple takedowns and legal issues. It just seems to me it would have had a more successful donation drive.

I just don't think the whole shift of web revenue is remotely feasible for most websites. Hell, we get paywall complaining on some of the major news outlet posts on HN.

yellowapple2• 7 years ago

When we add up all these figures we come to a total of $13.16 per day, which clearly can’t keep The Pirate Bay afloat.

I ain't so sure of that. That'd be enough to pay off the monthly bill for a small VPS every day or so (so 15-30 VMs - or one or two giant ones - would fit in a monthly budget), or to cover the power, networking, and other colocation expenses for physical servers. TPB is a popular site, but the computational load should be minimal; the only thing TPB hosts is the metadata for the torrents (whether in the form of a small downloadable file or a magnet link); a rack of older servers (5-10 years old) should be able to handle that mostly-static load.

Banking on the idea of Bitcoin et. al. getting more valuable is probable, though.

nemothekid• 7 years ago

What about the search engine? I don't know what TBP concurrents is like, but I'd imagine the the search index is the most expensive part of their infra aside from bandwidth.

yellowapple2• 7 years ago

Good point; forgot about search. I don't imagine it to be particularly sophisticated (probably just substring matching), and last I checked it has a minimum search term length (i.e. ignoring any search terms less than three characters in length); between those two factors it could probably be kept pretty simple and lightweight.

Pirate Bay Is Not Getting Rich from Bitcoin Donations

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