Eli5 How are websites able to provide pirated content for free? Doesn’t it cost money to host the content, program and maintain the site etc?
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Same way most companies make money, ads. Ads make the world go round, and targeted ads (ads based on demographics) pay even more.
The most common/well-know kind don’t actually host the content itself, just lightweight address books that point to the content (torrents). Of course, hosting the website itself and the list of torrents still take some resources, but it’s probably way less than you think.
This small bit is usually paid for through donations and ads, though. People enjoy good quality content providers and some are happy to fund part of it. Since the content itself isn’t really hosted by those sites, they kind of skirt the edge of legality and avoid being taken down/prosecuted, so being a supporter isn’t an automatic complicity in illegality.
Those types of websites either operate off donations, subscriptions, or more likely off running ads.
So why don’t advertisers just stop advertising on those sites? Some unscrupulous advertisers just don’t care, others don’t know.
Ad services are provided by bigger companies like Google and Facebook and sometimes they don’t know they are putting ads on a website offering illegal services until they are reported.
Two reasons:
1. Ads. There are a lot of companies such as porn websites, sketchy marketplaces, scammers, etc. that would never be able to advertise on a normal website, but piracy websites will happily take their money.
2. Most piracy websites use torrents, meaning the actual files aren’t hosted on the website and the website just provides a link. Links are cheap, so they really don’t need much money to keep going.
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Private torrent websites generally take “donations” for extra benefits such as extra invites for your friends or increased leniency toward the seeding requirements etc.
I recently heard from someone who works in the film industry that some websites make loads of fake GMail addresses, and basically horde free Google Drive capacity to actually host the videos, which severely reduces hosting costs. So, with ads on top, they make a profit.
Most content is not hosted on the site. It’s just a few pages with links. In the world of peer-to-peer sharing, the need for a single server housing all the pirated stuff is gone. Now, they just link you up with other users and you share things between yourselves. The cost of the site itself is minimal
I’m a gigantic pirate
ELI5: You know how you saw a tv commercial for McDonalds and they had that cool pokemon toy you wanted? So when you got to McDonalds we had to buy you a happy meal you didn’t really want just so you could get the toy?
NonELI5: Advertising, just aggressive shady advertising. The most common form of piracy is bittorrent where the actual “cost” of piracy (the bandwidth) is handled by one user to the next. Like you can make a copy of a CD I own, but you have to come to my house and pay for your gas to get here and your own blank CD. So the pirate website just maintains an index of bittorrent links. You’ll get about as many shady ads as a porn site, if not a bit more. If you have an adblocker or two it isn’t too bad.
You’ll have other sites where the files might be hosted on a paid filehosting service, like rapidgator or megaupload. In that case there’s a referral service to get people to sign up for the filehosting service.
If it’s something like pirating a stream say the World Cup or a UFC PPV, the ads will be more aggressive, but also related to betting.
That covers the majority of pirating. At a higher level you’re talking about scene groups and release groups, and those people aren’t necessarily in it for the money and it’s more of a weird clout thing. In those scenarios pirated content and access to the content becomes the currency.
Like someone has written a script to quickly download content from netflix and netflix doesn’t know to patch for it yet. So Wednesday comes out and it’s eight episodes, recording it all in real time would take eight hours, but using the script they can download all the episodes and post them online in an hour, and the first group to do that can attach their name to it and get recognition. Sort of a weird illegal influencer dynamic.
Or someone knows someone who works in a visual graphics studio, back in the day if you were in the oscars voting committee that was always an ideal time for leaks.
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