Not at all true
That just makes sense though? The legit sites have to pay for, fund, or in some way support the content which does cost money. The piracy sites obviously don’t have that cost so they don’t need as much income.
The piracy sites also pay a lot less in infra, since they rely on the user to store, seed to others, and serve the content to the local users. All that infra is offloaded to the user.
Sorry, what exactly kind of content are we talking about? You know, the one “legit” sites have to pay for but piracy sites don’t.
Fun fact: a lot of the content you see on big sites are advertorials, this means some company writes a fluff piece about how their lastest product can solve all your problems, and then pays the site to publish it. In print, you even have the option to have the ad use the same layout, fonts, colors etc. as the real content.
This means a portion of a site is not filled by content that had to be bought, but actually brings them money.
Do you think that Amazon gets its content (movies on Prime video) for free? Or do you think that piracy sites pay for their content (stolen movies on torrent sites)?
Edit: To answer you more directly, YouTube pays creators a cut of the ad revenue, and Amazon/Netflix pay the movie/show creators through licensing deals.
That’s some ground-level hanging fruits - do you know any piracy websites the size of Amazon or Netflix? Sure as hell I do not.
Piracy websites are usually pretty limited in scope. Places like some shady porn repos, pirated games and movies, etc. Of course there are some giants like thepiratebay but even they are nowhere as large as the ones you mentioned.
All of these, especially the big players, have high costs of maintenance and advertising. Just like their “legit” counterparts in size.
Depends on the piracy site. If you go to some of the pirate streaming sites or the blogs that host tons of pirated software with 30 rapidgator links that die after a month (instead of just using a torrent like a normal sensible person trying to share a 2-30+gb file that is begging to be taken down) without Adblock it’s absolutely comical how many ads there are. Even with Adblock those are the sites that manage to still have ads because they’re on the cutting edge of sketchy shit. It’s like seeing a late 90s to early 2000s website with how much random bullshit is pasted everywhere
Despite that I’m pretty sure that Amazon, google, etc do far more nefarious shit behind the scenes in terms of tracking/fingerprinting you and collecting data to sell
Bless MySpleen, OR, AR, and AT! Ain’t no ads nowhere no way
This is all spanish (as in castilian) media. The torrents are sparse and usually really badly encoded, I’m talking stuff like AVI codec in media produced in 2024.
There’s a better chance if you try to find it in the open with those sketchy links you mention or you are “lucky enough” to get invited to a Telegram group that has it uploaded to the platform, severed in hundreds of multipart files.
I’ve seen more Spanish people using the outdated Ed2K protocol through a/eMule rather than torrents even, it’s so depressing.
I’m pretty sure that Amazon, google, etc do far more nefarious shit behind the scenes in terms of tracking/fingerprinting you and collecting data to sell
You even get to pay more and more for this privilege…smh
Not the way I use legit sites!
Jokes aside, I agree and I hate it
I don’t think the facts match the claim, but I completely agree with the sentiment.
For years, the ‘legit’ consumer has had to deal with ad interruptions and bad UI and service disruptions and having media removed from their library. Something that pirates don’t even have to think about. The music revolution that Jobs and Apple created with iTunes, which allowed people to just buy music and just own it and just use it however they want (no DRM) with an ease that made piracy look difficult and seem too risky to bother, never came for TV or movies or books or any other media category.
And now the streaming revolution has all but undone that progress as well. You don’t own anything, a company decides when you have or lose access to something, and even if you pay money for access you are still advertised to and your data is still sold off.
Meanwhile, in a dark and forgotten corner of my PC, I STILL have several thousand MP3s I downloaded from Kazaa back in the day.
I remember iTunes only letting you change computer like 2-3 times max before the drm would make mysic not work any more, but maybe it was no-drm in the beginning.
I had a chinese 1GB shuffle though so IDK if that’s correct.
The chinese shuffle also doubled up as a usb key (very useful back then) and also didn’t need iTunes to function smh.
It may have originally had DRM but it doesn’t now.
But then later for like $10 I could take all my pirate music, legitimize it, and download a copy from iTunes if theirs was better quality. That was nice.
Yeah this guy is on some Apple fanboy shit if he thinks iTunes was drm free. Their shitty design for iTunes and decision to force you to use it despite it making the experience of listening to music much worse is the primary reason an ipod is the only Apple device I’ve ever owned. Freedom of choice and Apple have never mixed. That’s such a weird angle to take when describing them.
DRM apologist, like so many of the Steam fanboys. “No, it’s good DRM, you see?”
So they only forced everyone into their ecosystem for seven years and once they cornered their market they gave back the illusion of choice? That’s cool I guess but that’s explicitly the opposite of what I mean when I say freedom of choice, open source, DRM free, etc.
I’m not defending Apple. Just stating that at one time iTunes was DRM free.
Yeah IIRC you’re right, though I remember you could contact apple and reset it.
It was called FairPlay DRM and they only really got rid of it around a decade after iTunes launched. I’m not 100% but I think I had to pay to upgrade my already paid-for library to DRM free too
That didn’t last very long.
And yet I see 0 ads in either of those sites.
There are in the videos as sponsors for a lot of channels on YouTube, and as sponsored results on Amazon
Tbh I don’t care about the sponsor segments in videos. It’s actually my favorite way of advertising, as I can skip it or watch the funny ones (tomska does really funny - although slightly incorrect - segments).
But boy do I hate sponsored results on Amazon or similar platforms. I feel like I have to search through them to get to the actual products, and then I can’t trust the reviews
SponsorBlock takes care of the sponsored segments in youtube videos. There are addons for blocking sponsored search results on amazon too.
Of all the ads being pushed on us, this type seems like the least egregious to me.
Especially when creators find interesting ways to work them in, which is pretty often, in my experience. They’re the one type of ad that doesn’t annoy me.
I just noticed he also mentioned sponsored ads in Amazon results and etc, which are definitely worse than in YouTube/etc videos.
I’ve cut down buying from them quite a bit, but when using the Amazon app, or web without adblock, the sponsored results have made the shopping experience SIGNIFICANTLY worse in the last 6 months.
It used to be that you’d see one here and there, but the volume of “sponsored” results has gotten ridiculous, and the quality is awful. Half of the sponsored results I see - at best - are very specifically not what I searched for. Sometimes not even close.
It’s one of several reasons I hardly buy from them anymore.
Sponsorblock, my friend.
Seriously, this is the only way. My sympathy to the creators who need sponsors because fuck YouTube but damn is it getting absurd. Nearly as bad as cable TV.
Adblock my beloved
Besides streaming, i.e. the capability to watch the movies and series when you want and how much you want, and lowering the entry to produce videos for more people, they pretty much reinvented cable. Or did I miss something substantial?
They’re already consolidating in streaming services that bundle content packs.
Somehow “legit” sites won’t try to install malware on my laptop. So, I take more regular ads over piracy crap.
Who gets malware in 2024? Lol what
Ah no, most “malware” is just false positive of AV software, since repacked games look pretty similiar. And no such dangers with media files, as long as your system is uptodate.
Wasn’t there statistics a while ago already, that most malware comes from “legit” sites, especially newspapers (malvertising), by quite a margin? Hard to find now, too much noise.
Not to say you don’t need to be careful. But not much more than always with executing something from the internet.
One rule of thumb: torrent sites usually have a colorful pirate skull things for torrents from reputable groups (if not, look for a better site). They have a reputation to lose if malware gets slipped in. And they do what they do mostly for reputation and competition.
I remember my first time on the internet
You’ve never seen a DNS poisoning attack have ya? I’ve seen Google infect systems just because they looked up a particular football game, because some bad actor somehow poisoned the DNS cache.
So no, “legit” sites aren’t always safe either.
I know what dns poisoning is but it usually happens on so called legit sites. Pirate sites serve you malware out of the box.
If you would stop clicking on the ‘hot, horny single women in your area’ banners you wouldn’t have to worry about it
There is this torrent site I use that likes to use javascript to redirect to various malicious websites on every single click. After reaching the desired amount of clicks, it start behaving like a normal, “legit” website. Just of out curiosity I checked few other torrent websites and got the same result. It got so annoying that I’m using radarr and sonarr to look for torrents.
Sounds more like sharehoster behavior to me. Btw, i get that for (legit) Sims 4 mods too.
Hey everybody, this guy uses a shitty fucking site and thinks all piracy sites are bad! Definitely not confirmation bias with a tinge of ignorance
Why do you like to use this site if you know it’s trying to abuse you? There are countless others out there.
So far they have not proven themselves to make wise choices, or really know what they are talking about at all
Mostly because of the amount of good quality content. But as I said, I’ve moved to radarr/sonarr so I interact with less and less.
Ad revenue is like Crack to corporations. Once they get a taste for it, it’s all downhill from there.
Mostly because it’s the easiest money they’ll ever make and it’s more profitable than subscription models. Gotta see those numbers go up at all costs.
That’s normal, it’s the same infrastructure cost then the licensing costs
Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.
It indiscriminately pollutes whatever environment it’s conducted within, and causes secondary harm to non-participants by incentivising hoarding of PII in the cheapest and least secure manner.
It causes genuine harm, I’m visually impaired and I’ve wandered into construction zones because advertising billboards are mounted near and “road work ahead” signs and everything is all just bright and bold.
I don’t know what’s official, everything is competing for my attention but I have very little capacity to dedicate my full attention to a visual sign. The end result is incredibly fatiguing, seeing a bright sign and straining to ensure I read it because it’s colours look important, nope, it’s an ad, that was a waste of energy, oh look another one with the same blurry colours and type setting it’s probably the same ad… Nope that one actually needed my attention, and now I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be and I’m in danger.
I’m also hard of hearing, but fortunately audio adber in the public isn’t as bad, but anyone who’s hearing impaired knows how fatiguing it is to try and filter through noise. It’s the exact same for visual impairment.
Adblock is a cure for migraines.
Amen, I just need IRL adblock now please.
I have legit never bought a single thing because I saw and ad for said product. I don’t know who is out here making these campaigns so profitable
Brand awareness gets you subconsciously
I dunno, I don’t just ignore ads, I find them repulsive, like my scam-alarms go off even when I know that it’s probably a legit product. Seriously unless I get a recommendation from an actual person, the brand I’ve never heard of feels safer to me then the brand I saw a cheap ad for on some janky website. Maybe it’s because so much of the stuff I had growing up was knockoff/store brand, so I’ve hardly ever actually experienced anything that I saw an ad for.
I don’t know, I distrust all YouTube ads content creators slide into their videos, because the products are either useless to me, disappointing in real life like the “fruit smells” rings for water bottles or sketchy with some fear mongering like the VPNs.
Yeah I’m not gonna be paying for NordVPN. They’ve got this much money for ads and when buying 2 years at a time they’re cheaper than, say, Mullvad? Suspicious.
I do like some of the channels’ sponsor segments though. Internet Historian is great, OverSimplified can do pretty good ones. The Map Men are pure gold. But I’ve never bought into anything they’ve shilled at me, nor do I feel like I want to.
Sponsor block is a browser addons that addresses this niche
Here’s a really horrifying fact about ads, they don’t expect you to go right out and buy their product. Ads target your subconscious and manipulate your way of thinking. There was a study done by some university and tested by a few people across different fields of study that proved this to be correct. I wish I could remember off the top of my head where this was published. If you do a little browsing you can probably find it and you should because you can’t trust a stranger like me to properly relay the information.
People upload whole MasterChef seasons on Youtube. Legit
After Amazon said there’d be more ads recently, yep, more ads tonight. Done with it. My living room is not a marketing platform. It’s finally time to go back to the convenience and ease of piracy.
The new model is based around pirating Clarkson’s Farm and donating to farmers. That’s the point anyway. No need to bring Jeff into it.
