piratebay1.jpg

If you download a torrent, you're basically not paying for shit, which is part of the appeal. But there's definitely money to be made off sharing stuff for free, right? Otherwise why would anyone do it? Torrentfreak sat down with a professional pirate to hear his story, and it's fascinating. Of course, the pirate's true identity is kept secret, but Torrenfreak says he's responsible for hundreds of thousands of pirate links, and some 30,000 illegally uploaded movies.

From Torrentfreak:
I had just moved to Puerto Vallarta [Mexico] and went to a network’s website to watch a TV Show I had missed and I was blocked because I was outside the US. Grrrrr. Then a friend told me about [Richard O'Dwyer's former site] TVShack and a whole new world opened up to me.

...One day, there was a movie I wanted to watch and there were no links to it. So I did a Google search and found one and added it to TVShack. Yay me! I was part of the community.
From there the pirate went on to create something of an empire for himself. As for where the money actually comes from? Well, advertising. Torrentfreak explains:
The basic mechanism is that users upload hot content to file-hosting sites. The more people who visit that site to view the content the more advertising revenue the file-hoster makes. The file-hoster’s affiliate scheme then kicks in and part of the ad revenue generated gets sent to the uploader of the content. John says the payout to him is around $1 to $2 per 1,000 views of a movie or TV show.
By using that system and churning hundreds of thousands of links, the pirate is able to make what he calls a "nice living," though he doesn't elaborate how nice of a living he's making.

[Torrentfreak]