The Pirate Bay is arguably the best known pirate site on the web.
The iconic pirate ship logo is notorious around the world and more than 17 years after it first appeared online, the site still attracts millions of visitors.
During its tumultuous history, The Pirate Bay has weathered many storms. The site was targeted in large scale police raids twice and was the subject of a criminal prosecution in Sweden that landed several of its co-founders in prison.
Pirate Bay’s Backup Domains
The site also faced several domain name issues. In 2012 it switched from its original ThePiratebay.org name to ThePiratebay.se, fearing that the former would be seized by US authorities. Later on, when the .se domain was threatened, it rotated across several other domains in search of a safe haven.
That safe haven turned out to be the original ThePiratebay.org domain from which it still operates today.
Over the years the Pirate Bay team had many ‘backup’ domains available, just in case something happened. That included various exotic TLDs but the site also owned Piratebay.org and ThePiratebay.com. We use the past tense because both domains expired recently.
The domains listed Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij as the registrant and until recently the same Swedish address was listed in Whois data. For reasons unknown, however, the registrant let both Piratebay.org and ThePiratebay.com expire.
This isn’t a problem for the torrent site really. The domains were never used as the site’s main address. ThePiratebay.com did forward to the original .org domain at one point, but that’s about it.
Piratebay.org Auctioned for $50,000
None of this means that the domains are not valuable to outsiders though. This became apparent in an auction yesterday, where Piratebay.org (without the the) was sold for $50,000 to a bidder named ‘clvrfls’. The bid below ended up being the winning one.
The Piratebay.org domain failed to renew earlier this month after which the professional ‘drop catch‘ service Dropcatch.com scooped it up. They auctioned the domain off, which is a common practice, and it proved quite lucrative.
Domain trader and investor Raymond Hackney, who highlighted the auction at The Domains, tells us that the price itself is not unusual but for this particular domain, it seems on the high end.
“The price seems high for a traditional domain investor given the history of the name. Names sell for big money everyday due to a number of factors, sometimes it’s due to what some see as SEO factors like high domain authority and backlinks.”
This view is shared by domain trader David Marshall, who joined yesterday’s auction but stopped bidding after the price went above his valuation.
“I didn’t think it would go that high and don’t believe it’s worth this much,” Marshall tells us, adding that he planned to monetize the Piratebay.org through legitimate advertising feeds, as he does with many other piracy-related domains.
According to Marshall, auctions of high-quality Pirate Bay domains are very rare, as he waited for years for a chance like this. That may in part explain the high price.
How Will ThePiratebay.org be Used?
What the new owner will do with the domain is unclear. It has a substantial number of backlinks and there will be plenty of type-in traffic as well. This makes it well-suited to monetize with an advertising feed, but how much that will bring in is uncertain.
For now, visitors to the site simply see a standard parked page message, indicating that something is “coming soon.”
The new owner could also run a Pirate Bay proxy on the domain. This can be easily monetized as well and may attract a lot of traffic. However, that opens the door to all sorts of legal problems and could also get the domain banned from high-quality advertising feeds.
The bidders who lost yesterday’s auction will get another chance soon. ThePiratebay.com is expected to drop later this week and is listed at a pending delete auction, and ThePiratebay.net and Piratebay.net will drop in a few days as well.
