Comments on: So You Are Earning From Ads And Think Piratism Is Okay?

By: Juuso Hietalahti

Juuso Hietalahti — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 05:14:26 +0000

Okay, that was merely an example :) Techcrunch for example charges about $10k per ad spot per month… and they have some millions of pageviews. It really varies.

By: Michel Bartz

Michel Bartz — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:57:13 +0000

18k$? You probably far from what they get. My company once buy ad spots on TPB, and it’s not cheap, that’s all i can say.
And also for seeing the numbers of a site that make twice traffic as TPB, with 18k$, you missing some 0 ;)

By: Juuso Hietalahti

Juuso Hietalahti — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 04:43:13 +0000

@jalf: Do the math. Hosting 20 million visitor servers doesn’t cost 10k per month – more like 10k-20k per year. With 100 000 monthly impression one can generate like 300 bucks depending what sort of ads are shown and who is paying them. Showing 60+ million ads (they seem to have several ad slots) each month makes 600 times more -> like 18 000 bucks per month. And these are just example figures, worst case scenario could be anything from 6000 bucks… to something what techcrunch makes (10k+ per ad, and they have 5-10 ad slots which ads up).

TBP hosting fees (since they don’t even host anything, but only do searches) must be much less than what they are earning, or:
1) they are really bad at handling advertising

—-

With that being said, I’m not saying if the decision was right. I kind of think that this can make piratism even worse.

By: jalf

jalf — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 21:57:43 +0000

So where is this money TPB has made off their ads? As far as I know, there was no evidence given for the claim that they made millions in ad income. You’d think that kind of money would be traceable, wouldn’t you? You’d think the prosecutor could get access to that kind of information. But as long as they haven’t, I fail to see how we can accuse TPB of profiting off your work. Where’s the money? Do you have some data on the rates they get from their ads, on click-through rates, on how large a proportion of their users have adblockers on, number of unique IP’s viewing the ads and so on? If not, your claim that they make millions of dollars is worthless.

And once again remember that TPB has done zero active piracy. They have not posted a single .torrent link. They have not linked to illegal material. Their users have done that. I think that’s an important distinction. TPB might be illegal, but not because they’re guilty of piracy. At worst, they are guilty of failing to police their users.

There are plenty of ad-supported forums and bulletin boards out there as well, which users are able to (ab)use to share pirated files. Are the developers of the forum software guilty of piracy as well then?

By: Sargon

Sargon — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:39:12 +0000

And you know what, some little kids don’t pirate games even if their parents don’t buy them games.
There are also other solutions for kids who have no money.
There are a lot of free games.

I even heard of some creative solution game developer had for kids who had no money and wanted to play their game.
They gave a few free copies to kids, and in return the kids were spreading the word about their game.
I think that is a solution were everyone can be happy with.

By: Sargon

Sargon — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:34:20 +0000

A person who is over 18 have no excuses to pirate a game, whatever the price is.
If he wants the game so much, then he can work for it.
I can understand a little kid pirating a game, because he is not capable of making a lot of money, and little kids like a lot of games.
Its kind of like chocolate for kids. Most kids love chocolate, and if you won’t buy chocolate for them, they might try to steal it.

By: Thomas D.

Thomas D. — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 06:55:12 +0000

The motive behind hacks (which are something completely different to mere pirating) is usualy to increase a program’s quality (or flex some muscles as with hacked NES roms). This means, the original program was flawed, for example by including ads. Because, let’s face it, from the customer’s perspective, an ad is just some sort of bug (unless you do sports games where banner ads are commonplace in RL).

By: Juuso Hietalahti

Juuso Hietalahti — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 05:33:43 +0000

“no analogy doesn’t hold”. Let’s step back a bit:

- pirated copies (aka hacked version, that removes the possibility for the developer to earn money)

how’s that different from:
- stealing your work, hacking it (removing your ads) to remove the possibility for you to earn money

— how that analogy doesn’t hold? I’d be curious.

TPB offers links to pirated & hacked materials, earns money from ads on their site.

I offer links to the pirated & hacked work of yours (not hosted on my servers, but among users), and then earn money from ads on my site.

— how come that analogy doesn’t hold?

By: Israel Lazo

Israel Lazo — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 04:37:40 +0000

Where i live, most people that pirate games does it because here the games cost double price compared to north america and europe. Here you have to pay over $70 for some new released games. An Xbox Arcade costs $350 compared to the $230 price in north america. BUT the people’s income is a 1/4 of the income in north america. So here is so difficult to have original games, but is so easy to get the pirated version. I’m not telling that is a fault of the game companies, but maybe if you pay a price according your income you will not feel like they are trying to stole your money.

By: Ezequiel

Ezequiel — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 04:31:39 +0000

I found this related story on slashdot today:

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/22/0050214

An interesting solution that shows that copyright is not the end of all.