What is Digg?122 Comments
- iamthearm, on 02/02/2008, -6/+110I don't think they are making money but even if they where, I wouldn't care. They would be making money thru advertising not selling pirated DVD's.
- inactive, on 02/02/2008, -0/+61I'm sure they aren't making peanuts like most web sites and blogs out there... Of course lawyers are going to give highest estimates for the sake of arguments. It forces the defense to dispute it with figures that the court can then take into account in rendering its decision.
- n0c0ntr0l, on 02/02/2008, -4/+57What? They have to pay for server hosting you know....
Anyways, isn't that the pot calling the kettle black. The RIAA make about 3 times that suing people, yet alone from sales. And whos to say that people will buy CD's if there is no alternative? - SebHughes, on 02/02/2008, -2/+40Long Live The Pirate Bay
- halfcockedjack, on 02/02/2008, -6/+38They've got to cover their costs somehow.
- Sajentine, on 02/02/2008, -1/+24Why are you copying the article, there is nothing wrong with the link?
- jmpeagle, on 02/02/2008, -3/+23profit is not a "right" in capitalism and patents and copyrights are restricitions on market activity and require government enforcement.
- jmpeagle, on 02/02/2008, -2/+21change ethical to legal and your statement is correct at least in terms of the current laws
- bluelights, on 02/02/2008, -4/+22Let them make some money! I'd want to make money if I was the only driving force behind changing the music industry. Overall I would guess they run The Bay at a loss, bandwidth, hosting, server rental and all sorts of other costs cannot be equalled by advertising - especially since their advertising is limited (being a grey area legally for advertisers).
I say long live the bay, they're doing what a lot of us wouldn't dare to do and they're doing it very well.
I'll be following the case closely and downloading as much as I can while the IFPI, BPI and the rest of them are concentrating on the Bay. They wont go away as a result of this, I can only see it being free advertising for them.
"There is no such thing as bad publicity"
G - fkr3, on 02/02/2008, -0/+14I'm pretty sure they are actually making money. Digg's a comparably trafficked site on a comparible number of servers and they find the cash to employ 35 people, rent offices etcetera. VC is one possible way the costs are covered for digg but the VC they've raised doesn't go so far when you look at the number of staff they have.
- nthpro, on 02/02/2008, -2/+16Is the pirate bay down for anyone else right now?
- catalysis, on 02/02/2008, -4/+17I download all my movies and music but there is no reason to split hairs here. They make money by offering access to copyrighted content for free. They pay nothing for the content so really all they pay for is the server which is nothing but links and tiny files. Any site which draws hundreds of millions of hits will make the owners quite well off. Lets not kid ourselves.
- LucasVB, on 02/02/2008, -0/+12The site works for me. Wait, did other underwater cable just snap?
- ORMEs, on 02/02/2008, -3/+15If a cab driver provides you transportation to a street corner where you end up dealing drugs, is the cab driver providing you with drugs?
- SniperGX1, on 02/02/2008, -5/+16They don't provide access to pirated anything, that's whats up for debate in court. They provide a torrent tracker and people upload torrents of pirated material. If all people ever uploaded was creative commons movies, that's all they would have. They have no illegal material on their site, never have.
- psevium, on 02/02/2008, -0/+10Ars isn't going down any time soon
- Barbarino, on 02/02/2008, -2/+11I don't get diggs position on this. I wish everyone would just be honest. Legitimate use of trackers probably accounts for .0001% Pirate bay actually named themselves "pirate" bay.. Even if they are half right, that's still 1.5million with 99.999% of it from stolen material..
Enjoy it while it lasts, but be a little more honest! - grazzeh, on 02/02/2008, -2/+11A normal and very low CPM (cost per 1000 impressions for the advertiser) would be $0.30-$0.40. Considering the pirate bay say they have several millions of users per day and probably 3-4x that many ad impressions you can do the math yourself. It's perhaps not $3m/yr, but its still way above what SERVER hosting cost (ie, a couple of hundred bucks per dual xeon including bandwidth per month.. which they'd cover in about a week with these low estimates considering what hardware they seem to be using).
Please see adbrite.com for reference: http://www.adbrite.com/mb/commerce/purchase_form.p ...
Over 6 million pageviews per day. I call ***** on people playing digg users like tools. - fkr3, on 02/02/2008, -3/+11If that's basically all the taxi driver does...... then yes.
- HenvY, on 02/02/2008, -0/+8Back up now!
- plhearn, on 02/02/2008, -1/+9Because I don't want to scroll through 2 pages of text just to read the next comment.
- breadfred, on 02/02/2008, -1/+8Who's laws?
- catalysis, on 02/02/2008, -1/+8I have to say I'm getting a kick out of the comments claiming they are losing money and only doing this out of some sense of moral righteousness. I think some people get swept up in the mob mentality around here and tend to become a little irrational.
- imikedaman, on 02/02/2008, -4/+10"profit is not a 'right' in capitalism"
What the hell are you talking about? Capitalism practically *is* the right to profit. You are free to charge whatever you want for your products and services, but you're of course bound by the laws of supply and demand when doing so. There's an inherent upper limit to the amount of profit you can make for anything, but you most definitely have a right to try to maximize that value. - jeshjohn, on 02/02/2008, -0/+6It is going up and down.. and loading pages from a host in Isreal.....
- moocow1452, on 02/02/2008, -0/+6...unless your Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears.
- LucasVB, on 02/02/2008, -0/+6Holy *****! Industry lawyers are lying? This cannot be!
- fatdog789, on 02/02/2008, -0/+6***** the artists! They shouldn't be allowed to recoup their costs! Only people who distribute their music for them without permission should be allowed to recoup their costs!
- samard2002, on 02/02/2008, -1/+7"They've got to cover their costs somehow."
Why does that logic apply to people running pirate internet servers but not to people who write, produce and distribute music & movies? They don't deserve to earn a living? - fkr3, on 02/02/2008, -0/+5That's why he said "PER" server. I'm pretty sure they're not using top-of-the-range hardware for trackers and on top of that I would be amazed if they weren't getting discounted rates due to the number of servers they lease. The sheer number of ad impressions they're serving a day would cover their hosting costs in the first week easily.
- houndeyex, on 02/02/2008, -3/+8Actually they're profiting off of site traffic, sir.
- Yodzilla, on 02/02/2008, -2/+6they are making a ***** of cash from page views and advertisements. anyone that believes otherwise is naive as hell
- neveroffline, on 02/02/2008, -0/+4It is indeed down, I checked their blog via this article, and their main sites .org/.com, all down.
- Proteus1935, on 02/02/2008, -0/+4yep... down for me too...
- annonimality, on 02/02/2008, -0/+4They have 3 million reasons to keep going.
- blckt, on 02/02/2008, -0/+4Yep its down
- DemonWasp, on 02/03/2008, -0/+3The problem with your argument is this: "respect and decency". That's something that has to go both ways, and only extremely rarely does. The RIAA and MPAA do *not* respect their customers, instead we are treated as thieving swine (whether we do download individually or not). Being treated poorly (terrible prices, terrible products, holier-than-thou attitude coupled with the hypocrisy) means that these corporations are demanding the respect of their customers without respecting the customers in return.
In short: if you make it good, well-priced, and treat your customers well, they will buy it from you. If you make it badly, overcharge for it, and treat your customers like dirt, they won't, and they'll get the product any other way they can. - thedragon4453, on 02/03/2008, -2/+5According to the RIAA, over the last few years TPB have netted a profit of 1 hundred gajillion dollars. They must be stopped.
- Spyder810, on 02/02/2008, -0/+3http://thepiratebay.org/ itself works but it seems torrent search/browse is offline for some reason
- hunter65, on 02/02/2008, -1/+4I just checked and they are back up, with a new Banner.
- fkr3, on 02/02/2008, -0/+3Wow... I'm sure I read they had like 120 servers the other week. There's nothing remarkable about those machines, the top ones'd only be around the 500 a month mark judging by what my host offers similar hardware for.
- jmpeagle, on 02/02/2008, -0/+3property rights are tangible rights. You can't have a right to knowledge. Copyright laws and patent laws are the antithesis of laissez-faire capitalism by the mere fact that they require government enforcement.
- jmpeagle, on 02/02/2008, -1/+4no, you have the right to buy and sell whatever you want at whatever price you want, but rights imply government back force....no won is ENTITLED to profit. That is socialism and redistributive economice.
You have the right to economic activity but there is no right to profit. That would mean a company operating at a loss would be having its rights violated. - tgc1, on 02/02/2008, -0/+3Even if it is down, it won't be down long. And if they shut it down, like a hydra, it will grow two heads. I ***** you not.
- Elohir, on 02/02/2008, -1/+4The site is working fine.
- techresearcher, on 02/02/2008, -4/+7***** the RIAA and the Swedish authorities!
- bxblox, on 02/02/2008, -2/+4Digg me down all you want, but it doesnt change the facts. TPB makes money and lots of it.
- KyleGoetz, on 02/02/2008, -1/+3You think they've been running their website for years at a loss? What do you think, that the admins and owners were millionaires before it got set up?!?
- grazzeh, on 02/02/2008, -0/+2Actually, they have their servers listed here: http://static.thepiratebay.org/
It's worth nothing that the entire operation is run by a swedish isp called PRQ (thats why the raid was such as fuzz, the police took their customers boxes aswell). They most likely have access to pretty good deals both in terms of hardware and bandwidth. - KyleGoetz, on 02/02/2008, -0/+2Yeah. I'm not sure about Sweden, but in the US, calling yourself "The Pirate Bay" is pretty damn strong circumstantial evidence that you intended your site to be an infringement haven. Hell, one piece of circumstantial evidence used against Grokster is that they took the "ster" from "Napster," and therefore were trying to get the infringers from Napster to join their community by enticing them to infringe with Grokster (and we all know how THAT case turned out).
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