When it comes to peer-to-peer file-sharing, as soon as one site is shut down, another takes its place. The current darling of the P2P world is The Pirate Bay, a search engine for BitTorrent files across the Web.
It doesn’t actually host any of the files, but that is not stopping Swedish prosecutors from dragging them into court on behalf of Warner Bros., Colombia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI.
According to one of those prosecutors, the Pirate Bay makes $4 million a year from advertising on its site.
That site is currently tracking one million BitTorrent files, has 2.5 million registered users, and has peaked at more than 10 million simultaneous users downloading files at one time.
That comes to $1.60 per registered user per year in terms of what they are worth to advertisers. Not a very high rate.
But then, this is a volume business.
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