The problem with legal movies are DRM, vendor/device lock-in, forced ads, regional policies etc.
You can just download a pirated movie as a plain MP4/MKV/AVI file in the language you want (not necessarily the official language of your region) and the quality you want (some people like 30+ gib HDs, many prefer 5 of less gib per movie) and play it forever everywhere, including unsupported platforms (namely huge number of TVs and no-name set-top-boxes with USB ports, old PCs with exotic OSes etc). This (besides visiting cinemas, these 2 things don't really affect each other, people often do both for the same movie) is what almost everybody does in the eastern Europe. People don't really mind to pay some bucks for a movie/song/book/etc. but nobody in sane mind wants the crap I've mentioned in the first paragraph. Sell plain DRM-free standard-format multilingual downloadable files for humble prices (under $5 per movie) and you'll have almost all the audience pirate sites attract.
> as a plain MP4/MKV/AVI file in the language you want (not necessarily the official language of your region)
Not to mention being able to download subtitles in almost any language there is and then play the movie with those subtitles.
That's one of those things that drive me crazy about Netflix, Amazon Instant Video and such: there's a ton of movies I can't watch with my wife because her English isn't good enough yet.
> That's one of those things that drive me crazy about Netflix, Amazon Instant Video and such: there's a ton of movies I can't watch with my wife because her English isn't good enough yet.
I will tell you something more crazy about Amazon Prime. You will have an English movie available in the German catalogue but only in German (dubbed). You won't get the English version. I'd like to meet the geniuses who came up with these ideas.
You know what is more crazy. Having most of the movies in the movie theaters dubbed to the local language. I for the love of god can`t understand why people prefer to watch those lame versions and not with the original actor audio/voice. Especially when some guy is doing voice overs for several actors. It hurts my brain so badly I can`t watch it.
There are subtitles for that. When I watch movies from countries that speak languages I can`t understand I always watch undubbed with subtitles. Would you listen to dubbed favorite band or great vocals like Adele? I hope not.
I literally enumerated reasons why subtitles would lead to a suboptimal experience for people. You just ignored them and re-asserted your personal opinion.
Well of course it is a preference. I said that I just can`t understand that other preference. Because for me, dubbing breaks immersion so much more that it makes the movie unwatchable.
I agree with everything you stated, when dubs are good it vastly helps with the experience and I remember movies better if they have dubs.
That being said though when movies are dubbed badly it seriously detracts from my experience and I used to switch subs if it is early in the movie and they sucked. I eventually gave up of this practice and just watched with subs because there where so many bad dubs.
The Germans and French prefer dubbing, you won’t see it in the northern (Netherlands+Scandinavian) countries. In Switzerland, you have to look for version originale playings (at least in the French part).
The German dubs are usually quite good (some are so good that it is really difficult to notice that it's dubbed), because the majority of the audience demands it. Having the same voice actor for multiple characters would be unusual (at best), and often the same actor is voiced by the same voice actor across movies, though sometimes it changes.
In some countries (e.g. Poland) the theaters have two shows, one with voice-over usually afternoons - for the kids, and subtitles later/nights, for grown-ups that most likely have an adequate knowledge of the foreign language.
Meanwhile the DVD/Bluray version usually has at least English and German voice tracks and subtitles, but usually French and some other versions as well.
So, interesting workaround for Netflix:
If the language of your account is set to something other than English, it unlocks subtitles and dubs for that language that you wouldn't normally have access to.
My wife and kids have their Netflix UI set to Japanese, which allows them to access Japanese language and subtitles for movies that support it, even though they're not available on my English-language Netflix.
> If the language of your account is set to something other than English, it unlocks subtitles and dubs for that language that you wouldn't normally have access to.
Thank you for the hint, but don't you think this is a way ridiculous? Why can't people that prefer English UI (e.g. I do, although it's neither my native language nor the official language of the country I've moved to, I am fluent in all the three but am interested in content in other languages too and I always strongly prefer all the apps UIs to be in English) access content in other languages?
I checked it right now: no support for my native language at Netflix. Netflix is not interested in me, so I will continue to support pirates, which will translate Netflix shows into my language.
If you bear watching Netflix on the browser (for example Chrome and Firefox are restricted to 720p), you have the option to provide a subtitle file, but you are required to jump through another hoop as it needs to be in the DFXP format, not considering that you have to find one with the correct timing cause you don't have a way to delay/accel them in the interface.
There's a webpage that can convert SRT to DFXP and you can download the subtitles if someone has done the conversion be fore, but you are totally right, Netflix subtitles experience are subpar.
Their subtitle font CSS is pretty poor too. I have custom CSS injected to watch anything with subtitles because their default subtitle CSS gives a choice of a large box that blocks the content or provides no outlines around the text.
DRM, lock-ins etc. are a problem for sure, but this is a narrow view.
It's disingenous to depict torrents ("download a pirated movie") as a problems-free, conventient, alternative, since there is a certain set of associated problems.
There is malware lingering at each page. The movies are typically in english. Torrents may be very slow at certain times. Subtitles needs to be searched, generally separately, and generally, are available only in english. Subtitles may even be malware (happened a few times to me).
For a part of the audience, using torrents is worth the compromise, but it's not the very convenient and generic option that is generally depicted.
In addition, most of the people I know switched to streaming long ago; those who are willing to pay, use Netflix, the other ones, use streaming websites.
> There is malware lingering at each page. The movies are typically in english. Torrents may be very slow at certain times. Subtitles needs to be searched, generally separately, and generally, are available only in english. Subtitles may even be malware (happened a few times to me).
These problems are [mostly] solved for private trackers. It always amazes me that a group of volunteers can do a better job than huge companies that are dedicated to the same thing. I'd love to be able to pay for stuff with the same ease of use as a good private tracker.
There is not always a company dedicated to this thing. There is a private tracker where the three most popular torrents are the following: Andrei Tarkovsky Stalker, Chris Marker L'héritage de la chouette , Louis Malle Le feu follet AKA The Fire Within. Tens of thousands of movies, series etc you'd have serious trouble obtaining with money.
The second Vernay adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo from 1954 is considered perhaps the truest to the book but it is impossible to get hold of, especially in any digital format. It seems there was a VHS edition in 1988 and Amazon.fr occasionally has third party sellers selling them. Or you can torrent it. Vernay himself is dead for 40 years, Marais only 19 years -- but of course the movie is now over 60 years old. I do not lose much sleep over "stealing" it.
I am sure everyone on that tracker has similar stories.
Edit: I am so wrong! Apparently in 2015 a German publisher made a DVD out of it! I am off to amazon.de to purchase it. I haven't checked the last few years because it seemed rather futile. This time Hackernews served as a rubber duck for debugging, sort of :D
Private trackers leverage the power of exclusivity and status to get volunteers to work hard. I worked probably 1000 hours on about 30 movies to get access to some of the exclusive perks reserved for only the most skilled encoders.
To this day I'm proud of my work and glad that thousands of people have downloaded my completed works.
The little guys can do it where the big companies can't because the little guys can break the law and not get caught or sued into oblivion (for the most part).
It's a theme that appears a lot in these pages: you can do all sorts of neat things when you ignore the rules.
One of the big things people were mentioning here was having all the content under one roof. This is something the torrent space is great at, since they simply ignore ownership.
Of course, getting the content for free (or for the cost of one member purchasing or renting it a single time) doesn't hurt selection either.
Even the specific stuff mentioned here about subtitles is affected by the law: translations are derivative works.
And yet, torrents and free streaming are still more convenient than buying. That tells something about how bad official sources are.
As for the non-English-speaking audience, pirates tend to deliver better translated subtitles much faster than the official sources, and the latter frequently don't even bother - not a target market? Tough luck.
The critical point which everyone (including OP) missed is that on pirated websites : you'd get ALL movies under one roof. Even with streaming, you now have 10s of subscription services : Netflix, HBO Go, Disney/Hulu, Amazon Prime etc.
Roku solves part of this problem. While you do still need to maintain separate subscriptions to these services, Roku has a search function that shows you everywhere that a given movie is available (and for how much, if applicable), and lets you directly open that "channel" to that program.
Yes! This is another one I've forgotten to mention. And there also are many old and exotic movies/songs/books/games that aren't legally available anywhere.
If you run Kodi, there is a huge archive of subtitles that it automatically will apply. More often than not, I've started watching a movie, seen subtitles all over the bottom of it, wondered what the hell, and eventually realized the toggle to apply subtitles has gotten re-enabled somehow.
How does it solve the synchronization problems by the way? It's not always easy to find a subtitles file that will match the particular version of the movie second-by-second.
The length of the movie(extended cuts are longer) and other pieces of meta data to select the correct version of the subtitles. For DVD and Bluray sources it is nearly always accurate. Though those are usually included in the MKV container anyway.
This is factually false. You download subtitles from a website (generally, opensubtitles.org); if somebody has maliciously uploaded a malware to that website, you will end up downloading that.
Whether the carrier is effective or not (it's dubious that downloading malware masked as subtitles will be executed) is besides the point.
> The problem with legal movies are DRM, vendor/device lock-in, forced ads, regional policies etc.
This, right here. I recently tried to start watching The Crown. So I go to Netflix on my tablet and start it up. I get an error 5.2[0]. Following Netflix's advice, I force-restart; I reboot my tablet; I uninstall & reinstall. Hmmm … I am running LineageOS, so I do a bit more googling. It turns out that this is actually a DRM error. Oddly, I can still play e.g. Stranger Things.
Why the #*&@ does Netflix do this? I've been a customer for a dozen years; they've made quite a packet from me over that time. All I want to do is watch their content, that I'm paying for, on my tablet.
Not to mentioned regional modified versions of the movie/tv show, especially in regards to music, where it will be replaced with some random song that often doesn't make any sense.
I don't think reputable ad networks would advertise on pirate sites. The disreputable ones don't get you $2 cpms. Period. I think he is off by at least an order of magnitude, maybe more.
Source: I run twicsy.com, which major networks avoid because of nsfw content, and only get about 12 cent RPM (revenue per page per 1000).
They absolutely do, they just don't realize. There are a lot of schemes for "laundering" where the ad ran. Aside from popunder/redirect shenanigans that were covered in the press recently, they can iframe a "legit" site (that they control or partner with) which then runs the ad. They may or may not bother to actually arrange the ad to be visible.
One of our network's primary goals is to maintain a sizable collection of exclusive and AOR offers, including adult. Doing so successfully for 10 years, we're considered "top-tier" by our publishers and advertiser and are able to offer very competitive payouts. In order to accomplish this, we've filtered and pruned away publishers of the sort.
EDIT: Just realized OP is taking about incent stuff for hosting sites. We, and most "reputable" ad networks 100% disallow incent traffic and have a zero-tolerance policy.
Yeah it can happen, no doubt, but on a super high traffic site like the main video pirate site they are talking about I think they would stick out like a sore thumb if they were making millions. Or maybe I'm wrong.
So you think one of the highest trafficked sites out there can run this fraud scheme and continue to make money out in the open? I think that sort of stuff works spread across hundreds of sites, but not on singular high traffic sites like the one mentioned in the article.
Author here. The estimates could go either way. Kindly note that the stats are incomplete, notably the welcome page is missing.
Some ads are cheaper, some countries are cheaper. Put 3 ads per page from 3 different networks to counter balance. Then force the page to refresh once or twice. There are many ways to optimize revenues when one really care about revenues.
I hate to break it up to you but your site is picture hosting, it's low engagement and low value. People will not try the wrong "download" button 3 times until they find the right one, only to do the same thing again next week for the new episode of games of thrones.
As someone who ran a fairly large, mostly reputable website (reddit), I agree that you are off by an order or magnitude or more. There is no way they get close to $1 CPM. They'd be lucky to get 10 cents, probably closer to 1 or 2 cents.
They most likely barely break even after paying themselves a modest salary.
I run a network of a handful of sites that amass roughly 1MM hits per day. Over the last 14 days, my Ø CPM for pops is $2.74 across all countries, with the top CPMs being:
Country CPM
US $11.175
Nigeria $5.519
Italy $4.104
Iran $3.636
Japan $3.596
Grenada $3.591
Australia $3.217
Canada $3.198
Egypt $2.459
Panama $2.384
Germany $2.244
France $2.199
Israel $2.146
UK $2.109
South Africa $2.035
Denmark $1.733
Finland $1.732
Sweden $1.617
Portugal $1.579
New Zealand $1.545
UAE $1.528
Korea $1.480
Switzerland $1.476
Norway $1.354
Latvia $1.233
The nature is very similar to yours, except I use another social network as a content provider. I use a combination of the top ad networks and optimize placements based on payouts for a particular country. I do try to pop every page.
I forgot where I heard this from but I thought the reason reddit didn't monetize well was because the users were either using adblock or were too tech savvy to click on ads?
I have been using reddit for probably a decade now but don't remember ever clicking an ad. OTOH I typically misclick on a few links before I get my download when visiting pirate sites even with adblock on.
Most markets don't do CPM anymore they pay per click, so you end up with an effective CPM below 10 cents if you have poor click through rates and/or low payouts per click.
CPC is great. There are advertisers specialized in serving ads looking like download buttons, they will end up on the download pages and greatly confuse users. Fantastic click through rates guaranteed.
I don't think that your experience of running a popular site (reddit) is comparable to running a download site.
Yes, agreed my site is "low value". Despite the engagement though, an obviously pirate site is also low value by nature of the networks that are willing to work with it. Quote me some actual networks they use and cite the cpm's they typically pay and I will concede. Right now we are both speculating.
Definitely interesting stuff, but it is a different scheme that involves hundreds or thousands of sites. We are talking about a single insanely high volume site and that makes a big difference.
$2 CPM!! That's not even close to what shitty ad networks pay. Majority of traffic comes from countries with < 5 cent CPM
HOSTING COST
It's not just about running a wordpress website here.
Most decent site run auto uploaders which need decent size seedboxes. Easily hovering around a thousand dollars
Sources/runners:
If its a scene pre-d site you need access to some runners. Scene access isn't cheap
Changing Domains & black hat seo:
These sites are constantly loosing domains and almost all google ranking ones are using black hat seo to get their ranking. Usually means paying someone to do the dirty work.
--
Some revenue streams you missed
- Pay Per Link (aka locked/paid link shortner)
things like AdFly
- Background Crypto miners (becoming rather popular on streaming sites)
-'FTP ACCESS' / paid subscriptions
Still millions? Not by a long shot.. Few thousands.. Probably yes
It's really just about running a wordpress site. My blog is a wordpress so I'm pretty familiar with it. Just need a good theme.
It couldn't be further from being a scene site. The content is limited and most of it is published late compared to some other sources available.
AdFly is a mix of pay per view and pay per click. Didn't think it was worth a specific category but why not.
Crypto is a new thing, that certainly wasn't available a year ago. That's a very interesting point though, shady sites will probably be the first ones to have a good use for it.
I've said this before on HN, but we really need to get away from the idea that distribution is hard. Distribution is basically a Solved Problem. We don't need gatekeepers telling people what they are and aren't allowed to consume.
What we do need is better economic models that allow the creators to get paid. People are clearly willing to pay for content, but I don't know of anyone who wants studios/companies/lawyers/etc to get the money rather than the artists themselves. This old world way of thinking about content funding really needs to die off already.
And that's what I mean. It's stupid that disallowing redistribution is even a concept. We have data that can immediately be duplicated infinitely for free, why should anyone be barred from re-distributing it?
Because property rights exist to allow the owners of intellectual property a wide ability to legally control the (re)distribution, ownership, and/or licensing of their creation.
My point was more that it's not the issue of difficulty or whether or not it could be done, but rather that each property holder has different wishes, and many times their wishes don't conform to the model which you are suggesting. They don't really seem to want a consume-all-you-want because that hasn't proven to be able to replace the income from the classic distribution chain. Look at Spotify as an example.
Oh yeah, I'm not trying to argue against what you are saying, I'm arguing against the model we are using to monetize. You are absolutely correct.
IDGAF what the property holder wants, unless it's the creator themselves. Even then, if you don't want it redistributed, maybe don't put it in a format that is trivial to redistribute in. Just because they've been making money because of the old model, doesn't mean they have the right to keep making money once we've automated that away.
I want to add that I subscribe to Netflix, prime and some HBO content via a local partnership in my country but still regularly watch pirated copies of content available via my subscriptions for the following two reasons.
1. Netflix/prime/hotstar(HBO) content is often not in HD while the pirated content I stream is always HD.
2. Pirated sites give me a kind of federated search/browsing for all the content in one place.
The second point I fell is key and will remain even after the subscription services have improved their CDNs near where I live.
I know of a few teenagers who do this. Their sites have been taken down multiple times, but they never seem to stop. I completely understand that internet forums are no place for seeking legal advice, but I would like to know what can I do to thwart/report these people (in the United States).
(My real concern is that the money they are generating is being used to fund illegal activities in the neighborhood -- which I can not tolerate. I have lost a close one to a drug crisis already, cannot take it more).
Talk to your government about their drug policies enacted at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry. That's a much bigger problem than the teenagers in your industry.[1]
Of course, that'll also mean actually getting out the corrupt autocrats currently in charge. So... get politically engaged. (And by that I mean, do real work. Posting on social media is not getting politically engaged. Get out. Organize. Hold your politicians accountable. Run yourself.)
Going after the teens in your neighborhood might feel more satisfying, but the drug problem is a systemic problem. It's not caused by a few teens, it won't be fixed by locking up a few teens.
If someone says that they're trying to deal with local drug deaths, telling them that their local problems aren't worth their time isn't the right answer.
It's convenient to have a local scapegoat. It feels good to inflict pain on people you perceive as the guilty party. I certainly understand that. I've lost more than one friend.
But that convenience has brought us to where we are right now. If we continue to close our eyes to reality, preferring to go after scapegoats, guess what - nothing is going to change. We need to channel our anger into more productive channels.
You don't solve a systemic problem by attacking symptoms.
As banal as this question sounds, I am really interested in hearing opinions. These are not mere teenagers pirating movies -- they run massive operations (sites receiving 20 million+ hits a day).
If they're running sites receiving 20+ million hits a day (how do you know this, btw?) there's no way that the movie studios, or the people they hire to deal with piracy, aren't aware of it, if not the FBI.
If your real issue is about drugs in your neighbourhood, you should be focusing or asking for help on how to deal with that problem, not online piracy.
One doesn't have to fund the other; run both operations in tandem and it's a smart way to diversify one's criminal portfolio. If either end of the business goes under, there's still a revenue stream.
Here's a novel idea that will let you win those "lost" millions back: provide a legitimate service that beats pirate sites at:
- content can be easily found
- content can be easily viewed
- no arbitary restrictions (oh, you are watching from Sweden? Oh, you only get a downsampled version with baked in subtitles covering half of the screen etc.)
After reading discussions on this for years, I feel now that only a small part of piraters would now still go for that. A lot of them would argue that the price point is still wrong, or whatever restrictions are left are still unreasonable.
I think Steam is a fine counterpoint, given it was once extremely common to pirate PC games and many people just stopped bothering once it was easier to just buy it on Steam.[0]
I was happy to pay for Hulu until it took 3 ad breaks of 3 ads each (some demanding I "interact" by holding an additional 3 minutes of my time hostage if I refuse) to get through a 20 minute episode of a cartoon that aired on MTV in the mid 90s.
Isn't that pretty much the same amount of ads you'd have seen if you'd actually watched it on MTV in the 90s? Or actually probably less?
I avoid Hulu because of the ads too, and digital advertising is often more invasive (I haven't seen the "interact" thing you mention but it sounds awful). It's just interesting to me how much lower the tolerance for ads is between media.
Netflix's rise to be the king of streaming is directly related to viewers opting in for the ease of use and safety of Netflix (similar thing happened with Steam: it squashed piracy into nothingness even in countries like Russia).
Now that you will have to pay for Netflix, and HBO, and Disney, and Amazon Prime, and Hulu (I think they have exclusive deals), and that a lot of this content will not be available in non-US markets, the pirate sites will see a rise again.
And why would people in their right mind want to pay (for example as it is with many anime) for a stream only option, with no choice of subs or dubs given, no file download, etc. instead of getting it for free, cheaper, easier, faster, better, offline, etc.
Come back to argue your point when the actual offer differs only in cost and not in quality and convenience. When content providers will provide subs in a standard format, allow freely sub translations by third parties into languages they don't translate to, allow file download, DRM free, not region locked (it does fuck all and streaming sites and torrents are full to the brim weeks or months after releases), without tedious processes to confirm you are who you are and live in the right country (the only thing that they should care about is the payment), a.k.a. never.
For an extreme example see here (where my only legal and maybe available option for an anime that's floating around everywhere as 1080p BluRay rip is to get an Amazon Fire TV and hope I can stream it in SD quality to it after paying 20 dollars for the privilege): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989321
I went from pirate to Netflix once it became available in DE. Still too bad that e.g. ST Voyager or pretty much anything old is ultra gross quality... no wonder when the stream is 300mb per episode when a DVD rip is easily 3x the bandwidth.
I wonder if the problem is bad source material/generational loss. TNG is available in 1080p source, do you find low-bandwidth streams of that to be more palatable?
Yup. There are a lot of pirates who simply feel entitled to everything, and won't pay for anything. And yet, they would be the first to complain when they don't get paid for their own work.
Hell, on the @forexposure_txt twitter, there's a pirate Patreon site (taking the content that usually requires a donation, and offering it for piracy), and they're still asking for donations. And they honestly don't see the issue with it.
Yea I think I agree with this, most piraters are doing so because they are so used to the idea of FREE that the idea of spending any money at all on content is a disaster to them.
That's bullshit and hearsay. Until content is provided in convenient standard formats, DRM free (it does fuck all beyond annoying paying customers already), offline friendly, region lock free, etc. it's an apples to oranges comparison. An often offline/mobile binge watcher's only choice for watching conveniently is piracy or paying way more than the price of the content itself his in mobile data fees due to streaming enforcement. You can't even rip your own DVD or BluRAy legally due to DMCA supposedly.
I wanted to get my favorite anime ever legally and this is the end result (TL;DR; - I maybe could get an Amazon Fire TV and pay 20 dollars to stream into it in SD quality while BluRay 1080p rips mp4s are floating around torrents): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989321
Or are you going to tell me I should get a Fire TV and watch in half the quality and only on it, or hunt and get that DVD or BluRay from a private person on an auction site, just so I lose money and not get stuff for free, despite the studio not getting any from that purchase?
Not everyone is streaming the latest Game of Thrones or something. Niche stuff goes out of print, into copyright hell (NOLF game series), studios go bust (so no one who produced the content gets compensated for it, thus moral argument is gone), there are region locks (and Poland is no small or poor market for anime), arbitrary restrictions (on what languages and subs you get, on quality, on devices you can use, stream only enforcement, etc.) and then it's "theft" to want something you actually can't buy (and that would be feasible to be available with 0 impact on profits, and that's is actually available illegally and conveniently).
Copyright holders sell you crap despite non-crap being readily available.
Copyright holders have no intention and have made no moves to replace carp, or to make non-crap readily and legally available.
Why should I buy crap from copyright holders?
Netflix, Steam, and Spotify have shown that once you provide people with non-crap, people are more than happy to pay you, and piracy all but disappears.
I'm not saying you should buy it if you don't like it. I am saying that you are not entitled to just take it if you don't. You go buy something else that is provided as you want.
Popularity of both Steam and Spotify is a strong argument against that. I'd count Netflix too, except it has abysmal catalogue and often years of lag behind initial content release.
On the contrary, I would say that the popularity of those is a strong argument for the idea that those who pirate nowadays are not interested in paying for anything, and just feel they deserve the content.
baked in subtitles is such a pain, I would totally use the windows store to rent movies if not for the fact they bake in subtitles which makes it unwatchable since I don't read them and they are so often incorrect translations..
Also - no more "stream only" bullshit and "not available in your region" bullshit.
There is a certain anime I was interested in. I'm Polish so Crunchy Roll and Steam both are region restricted and tell me that it's not available here due to licensing (and both are stream only too).
Assuming the offer I'm seeing on Amazon streaming is available in Poland I can also get an Amazon Fire TV and stream it into that but only in 'SD quality' (WTF?!).
There are also DVD and BluRays. They are region locked and not rippable (that's breakable but it might be illegal to do so, i.e. in USA DMCA supposedly forbids DRM circumvention). They are also out of print, thus my only option is a used copy from some auctioning website, which won't support the studio or the publisher.
And then there is the illegal-as-fuck offering via dodgy streaming sites and torrents. Full DVD and BluRay rips, artbooks scans, 720p, 1080p, English dub, Japanese dub, third party and original subs: Polish, English, Spanish, English subs with descriptions of all sounds (for deaf people I assume), switchable subs in some standard format, streaming, download, no accounts needed, free, etc.
And then someone dares to come out of the fucking woodwork and say how "piracy is theft" and "pirates are evil" and "pirates are selfish and don't support the studio" while some people can literally go to Crunchy Roll or Steam, sweating, shaking, their full of dosh CC in hand, willing to spend 30 euros for the anime they want, and get told to either fuck off or gobble the stream up.
I even once had to use a cracked exe for a few year old game I have a Steam-free Polish language (subs) box copy of because the CD-Key verification servers are offline and all the support links and such from the manual are dead. Links to DMR-free patch on the Polish publisher website - dead/redirect to main site (a "redesign" took place I assume). Or (as some mindless copyright shill would likely tell me to) I could buy an entire second copy on Steam where there is no Polish version available and it's tied to Steam. That would be legal, unlike being able to play the game I bought 5 years ago in the language version I bought it in, that's a fucking crime apparently.
That crap also happens in weird regional pricing. The worst example I've seen is that flying to USA to buy a copy of a program there is cheaper than buying it on the spot in Australia (it's old but it's so idiotic I still remember it, I welcome the (c) shills to tell me how this makes sense because it costs $1700 more to sell a single copy in Australia than in USA because of labor costs, taxes, distance or something): http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/it-is-cheaper-to-fly...
If this shit (stream only, region locks, DRM, etc.) even worked it'd be vaguely less bullshit, but pirates are having a field day with all this stuff enjoying the sunshine when "entertainment" companies make people see red by spitting in their face and telling them it's raining.
It's truly baffling that almost all countries agree on Berne Convention and on stuffs as shitty as such long termed, pervasive and anti-consumer copyright laws, such harsh criminalization of piracy, blatant privacy abuse with DRM techs, all the while even "obvious and positive" things like outlawing child marriage or spousal rape or removing marry-your-rapist laws or even admitting climate change is real (let alone agreeing its caused by humans or agreeing to fight it!) are impossible to do globally.
Netflix is at 9 billion, this is a million with some optimistic numbers on CPM. If piracy is about making money then it seems to be a bad business to be in.
Yes, they are paying software creators to add a chrome install in the installer, usually with a checkbox that's enabled by default. I remember the creator of VLC saying that refusing Google's offer was the hardest decision he's taken, so the money offered must be good.
I hate pop-unders (background popups, whatever you want to call them) with a passion. When a website I visit spawns one, I immediately blacklist the entire domain. It's a losing battle through.
When you do a captive portal with some sort of timer (hotel, airplane, etc), they will sometimes do a pop under with a timer that has the option to pay more to renew. That can be slightly useful.
Or when you visit a site, and it does a pop under of a survey about that site. Then you see it when you close the window and maybe fill out the survey. That one is less useful but at least legit.
It's super ironic how many ads "attack your mind and computer" on your site. You must have like 10 ads on this one blog post... hypocrisy is a tricky bitch.
>What’s so special about this site? They made one mistake. They opened some of their analytics statistics in the period 2014-2015, probably not something they intended to do.
Does the author mean they made available their stats for the period of 2014-2015? The last sentence seems to imply it was a mistake? I'm not sure how the author got access to the page view data.
There's a section titled "Streaming and Hosting Affiliation" in the article that answers that. Fly-by-night file hosts that pay for hits and serve a billion malware popups to visitors.
Except that some of them (rapidgator, keep2share, mega, ul.to etc) have legs. They've been around a while now and dont use ads, at least not ads that arent easily blocked by 99% of users. They are shady, but thepiratebay is still a thing. Being shady doesnt mean you are unreliable or your existance fleeting.
tpb could for what its worth run from aws free tiers. The site is, with the exception of search, entirely do-able static html. It doesn't cost much money to operate, only thing you need is solid provider for hosting and a couple hundred grands for lawyers...
An anecdote but I've seen exactly that. Sites that stream foreign films that you can't buy using hosts that will open 10 tabs of ads the moment you click on a video, weird redirects, and a bunch of user-hostile stuff.
Usually I go to the network tab and pull a direct stream to the file hosted, but some even go as far as streaming using specialized clients that chop up the video and apply encryption (which I assume is easy to defeat but not worth the hassle when the whole point is to avoid the hassle of ads)
What you describe looks like the other type of shady sites. The ones that don't have any content, they just redirect you between fake pages and websites indefinitely. Sometimes it will ask to subscribe with your card or install a streaming software (always a malware). It's all a scam, there is nothing to watch.
On other sites I've seen they usually rely on a list of mirrors across several free video hosting sites that get cycled out as takedowns are issued. I've even seen some use Google Drive to host movies.
Come'on..they are nothing compared to the massive volume of money the producers are earning with streaming services and cinema ticket prices. In 2017 we are seeing the average price of 10€ for a 2D film and of 14€ for a 3D one..that is robbery
You can just download a pirated movie as a plain MP4/MKV/AVI file in the language you want (not necessarily the official language of your region) and the quality you want (some people like 30+ gib HDs, many prefer 5 of less gib per movie) and play it forever everywhere, including unsupported platforms (namely huge number of TVs and no-name set-top-boxes with USB ports, old PCs with exotic OSes etc). This (besides visiting cinemas, these 2 things don't really affect each other, people often do both for the same movie) is what almost everybody does in the eastern Europe. People don't really mind to pay some bucks for a movie/song/book/etc. but nobody in sane mind wants the crap I've mentioned in the first paragraph. Sell plain DRM-free standard-format multilingual downloadable files for humble prices (under $5 per movie) and you'll have almost all the audience pirate sites attract.