[draugadrotten]

> The ads were because of legal defence fees, which can be huge.

Citation?

The ads were making millions(1) to the people behind the TPB, and the legal cost is several orders of magnitude less.

update: (1) http://www.thelocal.se/20100930/29334 "The Pirate Bay earned up to 35 million kronor ($5.2 million) in advertising revenue from the file sharing website" (2010, already)

[cshimmin]

Several orders of magnitude? So legal defense costs less than ~tens of dollars?

[gcb0]

> The ads were making millions

Citation?

[undefined0]

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/feb/05/pirate-sites-ad...

Another citation: me, but not going to prove it. I am friends with an ad network TPB used. They made $10k daily from adware installers alone in 2013.

[chriogenix]

Exoclick was monetizing their traffic for a bit, not sure if that is still the case.

[caractacus]

The site had 50m uniques a month. At least 2-3 ads on every page. Even at a terrible CPM rate or CPC conversion rate, they'd have to be ansolute morons not to be making oodles of cash from that setup.

[chii]

i find that difficult to believe, because almost everyone who would go to the pirate bay would have adblock of some sort no!?

[zikzak]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/08/21/use-of-ad...

Maybe 30%, worst case?

[Ntrails]

I find this entire thread bizarre as I'd always thought pirate bay was ad free (and due to blockers never knew different)

[draugadrotten]

http://www.thelocal.se/20100930/29334 "The Pirate Bay earned up to 35 million kronor ($5.2 million) in advertising revenue from the file sharing website" (2010, already)

[cdevfr]

The Pirate Bay earned up to 35 million kronor ($5.2 million) in advertising revenue from the file sharing website, >>>film companies maintained<<<

And literally the second paragraph in your link:

The claims were dismissed by Jonas Nilsson, legal counsel for one of the defendants, Fredrik Neij.

Nilsson argued that instead of being a profits earner most of the work to keep The Pirate Bay running had been undertaken on a voluntary unpaid basis.

"The revenues, which were not very large, went to buying new equipment," Nilsson said.

[draugadrotten]

Well, you can say that "the prosecutor said this and the defendant counsel said this", but at the end of the day we know that the four operators of the site were convicted by Stockholm district court on 17 April 2009 and sentenced to one year in jail each and a total of 30 million Swedish kronor (approximately US$3.5 million, €2.7 million) in fines and damages.

So I guess the court believed the prosecutor.

[deciplex]

Well, for one, that the fines and damages were n has no bearing on what profit the site made, if any.

And, two, given the current legal environment in most of the West including Sweden, "the court believed the prosecutor" doesn't mean shit, really. Of course the court believed the prosecutor - they are on the same team, after all.

[bjourne]

From what I remember the defense never provided any counter-claim about how much money tpb made. All they argued was that the prosecutors claim was ridiculously high. Exactly how much money the ad networks paid out is not publicly known but wire transfers are tracable. So it seems obvious to me that if brokep and anakata during the trial wanted to prove how much or how little the tpb made, then it would have been easy for them to do so.

[cdevfr]

How does that help your point. You still haven't provided any information that would back your claims.

[caractacus]

Can you try and persuade me that TPB wasn't making substantial revenue when you have millions of daily visitors and a hell of a lot of ads? It seems a pretty simple assumption to make. What factors were in place that stopped that revenue flow?

[imanaccount247]

>So I guess the court believed the prosecutor.

How do you figure? Their fine was not based on their advertising revenue was it?

[belorn]

The fine was based on what a theoretical license would cost per infringing item, multiplied if I remember correctly by 4. The theoretical license cost was created from estimates by the plaintiffs.

[sebcat]

... according to the prosecution, who pulled those numbers out of thin air, with no actual evidence what so ever. You see parts of that in the TPB - AFK documentary.

[musername]

a vrry impartial source, indeed /s

[belorn]

That number was based on how much advertising space earn on sites with similar unique visitor count, like BBC or NYT.

The assumption is that that companies are willing to spend the same amount of money to advertise on a torrent site as a international news paper.