How does torrent sites make money?
In: Technology
Usually ads. The Pirate Bay trial in Sweden gave an insight into the venture. They made millions on ads, paid zero in license fees to copyright holders. That made them a lot of money. Another interesting aspect in the trial, was that the defense claimed the owners were mere a platform and didn’t know what was shared. Yet they did remove mislabeled titles or fake content and child pornography, so they did indeed have a very active role in what was distributed on their site. That was one of the reasons their “we are just a natural search engine” defense didn’t work.
there are several options:
– they dont (some might just set up a torrent server because they want to and then pay the bills themselves)
– ads on the site
– donations (paypal/bitcoin-donations from people using the site)
– in theory: by adding malware to the torrents (and thus turning your computer into a part of a botnet for example or the like)….but I don’t think this is actually done (or rather the one providing the platform is rarely the one providing the actual torrents, so…)
Latest Answers