Torrent Directory Mininova Made $1.3M in '07
Mininova is raking in the Euros.
While Europe may be the front lines in the battle between P2P and the media, it won't stop websites like Mininova from turning a profit...and then some.
According to a financial statement filed by Mininova with the Netherlands' Chamber of Commerce, the popular torrent tracker site saw its revenue grow to €1,037,560 (about USD $1.3 million) in 2007, up from €600,000 in 2006. $1.3 million...not a bad chunk of change for a company that is constantly targeted by the film and record companies as a haven for the distribution of copyrighted material.
While revenue is high for Mininova, site spokesman Niek van der Maas says the money comes into the website like any other - from advertising. According to Ars Technica, Mininova's revenue is generated largely by the ads that grace its pages. While van der Maas is quick to point out that advertising has nothing to do with copyright infringement, the users who seed and leech torrents of copyrighted material through sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay are the same users who click on the sites' advertisements. Whether your website is a torrent tracker like Mininova or a reviews/news site like Tom's Hardware, there is an undeniable link between content and advertising.
Mininova isn't the only torrent tracker that may or may not be rolling in the money. During the final days of The Pirate Bay's trial, the prosecution accused the website of generating upwards of USD $1 million. During a court recess, TPB's Gottfried Svartholm Warg said the accusation was "totally absurd," and "those numbers are totally disconnected from reality." If Mininova, which is just as popular as The Pirate Bay, is generating millions in revenue, then TPB could easily maintain such a cash flow.
While both Mininova and The Pirate Bay are known for tracking torrents of copyrighted material, there is one distinct difference. While Mininova says it complies with all requests to remove copyrighted material (and has a page where such requests can be made), The Pirate Bay laughs at and ridicules any such requests.
As of February 2009, Compete.com estimates that TPB sees almost 2.4 million unique visitors a month, while Mininova has around 1.6 million.
UPDATE: Tom's Guide would like to clarify that Mininova is a torrent "search engine/directory", and not a torrent tracker. While torrent trackers like The Pirate Bay require users to communicate with their servers during a download, Mininova does not host any trackers whatsoever.
-
Previous News Article
New iPod Shuffle: Simple, or... -
Next News Article
Google Launches Phone Service
If only those Euros were worth something right now.
Mininova doesn't host trackers (at least as far as I know), TPB hosts many trackers though. Mininova hosts (torrent) files that contain lists of trackers, not the trackers themselves.
Hopefully TPB will be shut down and it will set a legal precident that no place is safe from illegal activity.
Hopefully TPB will be shut down and it will set a legal precident that no place is safe from illegal activity.
TPB is not illegal...just yet anyhow
Hopefully ubisoft will start releasing demos for their games... did anyone else notice the INSANE amount of torrents there were for far cry 2? That's what happens when you hype up and under-performing game and don't release a demo.
True, but it would also signfy that private companies can censor the internet.
And on that note, I just received notice from my ISP that they "do not support P2P file sharing blah blah blah". Since when do they decide how I legally use my bandwidth? I read the EULA and it wasn't in there...
I'm going to quote Lars Ulrich, Napster Killer, for irony: "Freedom, with their exceptions..."
Close it all down. We'll just invent another method. Stop fighting it.
Maybe lower the game costs? $60 for a game I'll play for 10-20 hours? Maybe $20 a game and I'd be buying them. Seriously, the prices are just too high. Software too. Yea, Photoshop is nice, but for $600? Dream on. Make it $200 and I'll buy.
Trying to make the oporators of a website responcible for content posted by other users is silly and pointless.
As p05esto said. Close it all down and a new setup will simply spring out of the woodwork. Lets try to remember that "supernova" got shut down...and behold mininova sprung up.
TPB made a poor choice in name of course, but Prange's point is a bigger factor to me. If I made a site, to host pictures and profiles, or a site to allow chat, or a site for people to post torrents and someone else abuses it, how would it be right to blame me?
Why would I want to spend my time policing others?
A lot of piracy comes down to service and convience. A lot comes down to bad pricing models. The rest involves cheapskates who cut corners in life regardless and piracy is simply an extention of it.
I bought the orange box. The price was fair, steam is pretty damn convienient, content updates mean I made an investment that I see returns on. That's a good model.
Makes sense, I used to know people (young people around 18 years old) running top rated emulator sites years ago and they had no job and did not go to school and just reaped the benefits of the banners making $2000 + per month in their pocket on top of server costs.
Close it all down. We'll just invent another method. Stop fighting it.Maybe lower the game costs? $60 for a game I'll play for 10-20 hours? Maybe $20 a game and I'd be buying them. Seriously, the prices are just too high. Software too. Yea, Photoshop is nice, but for $600? Dream on. Make it $200 and I'll buy.
I agree in many senses.
$70-80 CAD for a new game is just ridiculous. Very few games are worth the less than 5 hours I play most games (most games suck, I only finish good games). Paying $80 for a game that sucks, and I will never complete is a complete stack of bullshit.
How about movies? $20+ for a 90 minute movie that sucked (I want my 90 minutes of life back half the time, never mind my money)... A good movie to me is at least 120 minutes long, and I usually prefer old movies.
Microsoft office. How do they expect a student to dish out $100+ for something all students should have?
Honestly, make the prices fair, and I'm down. I gladly pay for the games I like. My game collection cost likely over 40 games at a value over $1500 and that does include used games (only about 10 games were worth it). My movie collection is >$100... At a buck a song or more, all the music I ever bought totals to $15 (a single CD).
Can you blame people for torrents? Who's really the thief at $1.50 a song?