
Pirate Bay Is Not Getting Rich from Bitcoin Donations - wslh
https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-is-not-getting-rich-from-bitcoin-donations-or-190922/
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rwmurrayVT
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.

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livueta
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.

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rwmurrayVT
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.

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yellowapple
> 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.

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nemothekid
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.

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yellowapple
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.

