Running servers costs money. And IIRC they were actually losing money even with the ads.
Source: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/02/pirate-bay-big-re...
Edit: Why the downvotes?
Revenues are similarly easy to calculate: add up all the payments received by whatever ad networks, affiliate programs, partnerships, and so on they use. Some may pay weekly, some monthly, some quarterly... whatever. But it should be trivial to add these up over the course of a 3 month, 6 month, or 1 year period.
Any competent 10 year old should be able to take the revenue and expense information and calculate a net profit or loss. Barring that, anybody in the same position should at the very least be able to consider whether the statement "I regularly dip into my personal savings to pay for the site's operations" rings true for them or if they never had to do that. If the revenue and expenses were co-mingled with their personal bank accounts, it should be easy to separate out other sources of revenue and look at income vs. expense from site operations.
Depending on how much their income did fluctuate and how irregular their expenses might have been (especially if you consider "one time" expenses like hardware with an indeterminate life expectancy) and if you then consider that they likely had their hand in the cookie jar while also throwing "their own" money back in when they needed to, it can be a huge ball of mud.
You could determine the total loss/gain by adding up the business-related expenses and income, but that assumes they were interested in doing so.
I'm sure they had at least a general idea of how well they were doing "right now" (i.e. assuming no catastrophic hardware failures or drastic changes in revenue, etc), but unless they were certain they weren't making much money (or even operating at a loss), they had no incentive to put their exact net profit/loss into clear terms.
Considering how easy it is to burn large sums of money without really being aware of where it all went, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt that they actually didn't know if they made a ton of money. But I'm fairly certain they knew the general direction they had been heading well enough not to be honest about the specifics.
However, they would have to been incredibly incompetent not to make millions off the advertisment, based on their amount of traffic. This was key in the procedings.
I mean.. right now thepiratebay.se is at top 90 in the alexa ranking. More traffic than e.g. nytimes.com, ebay.co.uk, redtube.com, dailymail.co.uk, etc etc.
Meanwhile, the hosting cost for this service is comparatively extremely small. Saw some list recently of 20 servers. Perhaps true, but seems inefficient. Still, at that level, peanuts compared to the ad revenue.
I have an hard time though to believe they would be losing money. How could they afford to keep it online at that scale if they had to use their own money.
You never saw any pornographic ads on Pirate Bay? That's mostly the ads that I saw the last time I went there, but I wasn't searching for porn at all. I'm pretty sure though that people that goes to pornhub want porn, so theses ads should generate more profit on pornhub than on Pirate Bay.
We could also talk about brand association, etc... but I hope you already understood how it's easier to make money out of porn comparatively to illegal torrent tracker.
Ask what market tpb advertisements are on. Is it more similar to those of nytimes, or to a spam network using botnets to send emails?
A botnet that send spams can easily reach more eyeballs than any top 90 ranked website, and thanks to security researcher, we do actually have a good idea how much they earn. Unsurprisingly, its far far less than a nytimes.com makes per eyeball.
What people are willing to advertise on tpb, and what are the competitor on that market. My guess: spam networks. based on that, revenue from tpb is going to be very similar to the hosting cost, or even below that.
In contrast, they have banners on the results page, pop-ups when you interact on the results pages, and massive banners on the item pages.
A good chunk of their clientèle hopefully runs adblock, and I also can't imagine the ads they're serving are very lucrative since few legitimate companies will want to do business with them, but I can't imagine that it balances out.
Even if 1/2 their traffic is using adblockers that still leaves billions of ad impressions a month. There is no reason to believe their lies about how much servers cost, especially on a site like HN where many people have first hand experience of more elaborate hosting costs and advertising.
2009 = 1b pageviews/month https://gigaom.com/2009/07/19/the-pirate-bay-distributing-th...
2014 = 90th most popular website on the entire internet, which itself grew massively in that 5 years
I'm not saying they made no money, but I doubt it would have been as lucrative as if those page views were dedicated to, say, www.wickerbaskets.com or something else.
How big market do you think there is of advertisers that are willing to pay with bitcoins in order for advertisement space on a bittorent site?