
Torrent search engine Mininova earning €1 million a year  - peter123
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/03/torrent-search-engine-mininova-earning-1-million-a-year.ars
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nikblack
Fact is it is _a lot_ more than that. I remember reading on a forum that it is
$4-5M a year, which would make more sense because that is what you get when
you multiply out 19M pageviews per day by 10c CPM and 50% sales rate.

They are, like a lot of other companies, simply under-reporting on their tax
obligation, since ad revenue is easy to manipulate/hide.

Launching sites like 'snotr', on the other hand, assures that these guys are
going to be one-hit wonders.

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immad
Lets say you spend 5k/month on servers which seems low and have 5 employee
that get 60k/year each after taxes that only leaves 700k or so. Tax that a bit
and maybe split that between 2 or 3 founders and it is not much more than a
normal salary for a lot more risk.

~~~
vaksel

      Mininova is running on 4 webservers, 4 database servers, 2 search servers, 
      one NFS server, and one load balancer (plus 5 additional servers for the forum, blog and the ads).
    

Its probably a little higher than 5K for servers. But I bet the 5 employees
includes the 3 founders, so the overall profit per founder is still fairly
high.

1 mil - 10-20K for servers/bw - $120K for the 2 employees -10K for misc stuff
like office/pens= ~850K

Corp tax rate in netherlands is 25.5% = $633K profit

So if the 3 founders split evenly, each would get €211K euros or $271K
dollars. Hardly peanuts, and worth the risk

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immad
I disagree. If they are smart and a good developers they could earn €100K in a
normal job (10yrs experience lets say).

Is 2-3x increase in salary worth the risk of possible jail time? Also instead
they could do other entrepreneurial things and get much higher upside profits.

In general it just seems that if you are going to do gray/black things at
least have massively super-normal profits. But maybe they are just doing it
out of principle.

~~~
vaksel
You don't need to be smart and good to start a torrent site. There are
thousands of them online at this point.

The 2-3x salary increase is also faulty. A salary is pretty much capped to a
tiny raise...year in, year out. Businesses on the other hand grow more or less
exponentially. So yeah, 2-3x salary may not be worth it, but you need to take
the long term view, a few years from now that # will be 5-6x salary...more or
less guaranteed without major effort.

Also, I don't really buy the going to jail argument, these guys aren't in the
USA, so they are a lot more protected from RIAA etc. And worst case scenario,
they'll have to shut down the site and pay a small fine. And the most extreme
scenario where they go to jail...its not like they'll end up with the general
population, they'll go to some white collar prison instead.

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gacek
When RIAA 'thinks' that people outside US fall under US laws - thats
ignorance. But when people think that those outside US do not have copyright
laws - well, thats kind of ignorance too.

You're only guessing the 'worst' or 'extreme' scenarios. And as for 'white
collar prisons' - just google the stanford experiment.

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triplefox
I wonder when the day will come that public torrent trackers start earning
more than old media publishers?

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amix
My comment about Pirate Bay makes much more sense now:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=500440> (and from what I know TPB get a
lot more traffic than Mininova).

