Torrent search engine Mininova earning €1 million a year | Hacker News Reader

Torrent search engine Mininova earning €1 million a year

arstechnica.com

36 pointspeter12317 comments

Fact is it is a lot more than that. I remember reading on a forum that it is $4-5M a year, which would make more sense because that is what you get when you multiply out 19M pageviews per day by 10c CPM and 50% sales rate.

They are, like a lot of other companies, simply under-reporting on their tax obligation, since ad revenue is easy to manipulate/hide.

Launching sites like 'snotr', on the other hand, assures that these guys are going to be one-hit wonders.

Lets say you spend 5k/month on servers which seems low and have 5 employee that get 60k/year each after taxes that only leaves 700k or so. Tax that a bit and maybe split that between 2 or 3 founders and it is not much more than a normal salary for a lot more risk.

  Mininova is running on 4 webservers, 4 database servers, 2 search servers, 
  one NFS server, and one load balancer (plus 5 additional servers for the forum, blog and the ads).

Its probably a little higher than 5K for servers. But I bet the 5 employees includes the 3 founders, so the overall profit per founder is still fairly high.

1 mil - 10-20K for servers/bw - $120K for the 2 employees -10K for misc stuff like office/pens= ~850K

Corp tax rate in netherlands is 25.5% = $633K profit

So if the 3 founders split evenly, each would get €211K euros or $271K dollars. Hardly peanuts, and worth the risk

I disagree. If they are smart and a good developers they could earn €100K in a normal job (10yrs experience lets say).

Is 2-3x increase in salary worth the risk of possible jail time? Also instead they could do other entrepreneurial things and get much higher upside profits.

In general it just seems that if you are going to do gray/black things at least have massively super-normal profits. But maybe they are just doing it out of principle.

You don't need to be smart and good to start a torrent site. There are thousands of them online at this point.

The 2-3x salary increase is also faulty. A salary is pretty much capped to a tiny raise...year in, year out. Businesses on the other hand grow more or less exponentially. So yeah, 2-3x salary may not be worth it, but you need to take the long term view, a few years from now that # will be 5-6x salary...more or less guaranteed without major effort.

Also, I don't really buy the going to jail argument, these guys aren't in the USA, so they are a lot more protected from RIAA etc. And worst case scenario, they'll have to shut down the site and pay a small fine. And the most extreme scenario where they go to jail...its not like they'll end up with the general population, they'll go to some white collar prison instead.

When RIAA 'thinks' that people outside US fall under US laws - thats ignorance. But when people think that those outside US do not have copyright laws - well, thats kind of ignorance too.

You're only guessing the 'worst' or 'extreme' scenarios. And as for 'white collar prisons' - just google the stanford experiment.

Are you serious?! I could be making that much money by now?!?!

Yes, $120k/year is a reasonable sum for a 10 year senior developer, and not just in the Silicon Valley.

Check out http://www.glassdoor.com/ for overview of how much money people make in different companies and locations.

It depends on what you do, of course - designing web sites for hire probably does not pay very well. Enterprise software OTOH pays very well.

Bottom line is that your time is very valuable, but you need to find a place where it can be put to productive use.

Ah. Originally the op said 200,000 euroes

But what is productive use?

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/12/how-to-make-lots-of...

Disregard the title, read the content and make sure you understand what it means "to create and deliver value". Then you will undestand how to spend your time productively.

But what if I don't care how much value I'm going to deliver?

The surest way to make money is to create and deliver value. If you skip on either of the two your chances are shrinking.

Clearly the convention wisdom -- that you can get rich by hosting a site that lets people get free stuff they'd otherwise pay for -- is deeply flawed. Let's find all the people who run their torrent sites for the money, and tell them how wrong they are.

I wonder when the day will come that public torrent trackers start earning more than old media publishers?

My comment about Pirate Bay makes much more sense now: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=500440 (and from what I know TPB get a lot more traffic than Mininova).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com