As we all know high traffic sites generate a lot of ad revenue. One question that I have been dying to see answered is how much money these big torrent sites are making. Armed with my scary question I emailed a few bittorrent webmasters and waited for them to reply. Almost all webmasters were hesitant to answer my question and were not sure if they could trust me, one even replied that they only do press releases via TorrentFreak. After negotiating with a few webmasters, they agreed to hand out a global estimation on how much revenue they generate, under the condition that I don’t reveal their identity.
Having emailed around 12 torrent site owners, only 4 of them were ready to spill the beans. One very large torrent site with over 500.000 visitors per day told us that they are generating around 30-40K per month and a double of that amount during the last two months of the year. Another torrent site with more then 300.000 visitors told us that they were making 50K per month on average. The other two torrent sites were generating a revenue of 35-60K respectively.
When you think about it, most of these sites are administered by very young people, some under the age of 20. We were wondering what such youngsters are doing with that amount of money, well we got a few interesting answers. One site admin told us they were investing in real estate and side projects. Some even told us that they believe bittorrent isn’t going to last forever. The growing pressure from anti piracy groups has forced us to look for other sources of income.
Final thoughts:
It’s obvious that Bittorrent is big business and that webmasters will go to extremes to protect their interests. The only downside to having all that money is that it makes you a big target for anti-piracy groups. No wonder these webmasters are so careful. Keep up the noble work guys!
Source: http://www.peertopress.com/how-lucrative-is-bittorrent
Bookmarks