With millions of regular users per day, The Pirate Bay is arguably the most visited torrent site on the web.
TPB officially operates from the domain thepiratebay.org which has been in use for more than seventeen years now.
Just in case something happens to the original domain, the site also owns several alternatives. Until recently, this included prominent domains such as Piratebay.org and Thepiratebay.com.
Piratebay.org Sold For $50,000
These backup domains have been linked to the official Pirate Bay team for years. However, this summer the owner ‘forgot’ to renew them. As a result, they ended up at auctions where Piratebay.org sold for $50,000 and Thepiratebay.com brought in $35,150.
This money didn’t go to The Pirate Bay team, obviously, but to the professional ‘drop catch‘ service Dropcatch.com, which scooped them up.
These types of sales are not unusual. There’s a whole industry of traders who buy high traffic domains, which are usually monetized through ad feeds. This is exactly what happened to Thepiratebay.com.
That said, the $50,000 price tag of Piratebay.org was higher than usual. According to a domain expert who participated in the bidding, it’s not worth that much for regular brokers. That begged the question, who bought it, and what are the plans?
Pirate Bay Pictures
A few days after the sale the buyer appeared to uncover the ‘masterplan’. The domain was put up for sale again by an unknown entity called “PirateBay Pictures” who said they are crowdfunding a new film; The Torrent Man.
We were highlyy skeptical of this claim and asked the domain owner some questions, which remain unanswered today. As it turns out, the skepticism was warranted as the “Torrent Man” pitch disappeared recently. Instead, Piratebay.org now redirects to a TPB proxy.
A quick look at the Whois data shows that the domain wasn’t sold again, which makes sense, as the $2 million asking price was a bit high.
Recoup The Investment
It seems more likely that the whole “Torrent Man” announcement was simply a trick to generate more press attention, which we hinted at before. More backlinks raise the value of a domain name after all.
It’s possible that the redirect, which currently points to pirate-bay-proxy.org, will change again in the future. The goal will likely remain the same though, recoup the $50,000 investment.
At the time of writing, pirate-bay-proxy.org displays prominent popups for NordVPN. Those can be easily closed, after which it operates as a regular proxy, which loads another proxy (tpb.party) through an iframe.
The pirate-bay-proxy.org homepage itself is littered with keywords that are meant to draw search engine traffic. This also reveals that the person operating it isn’t really in tune with the true Pirate Bay attitude, as the page ends with the following statement…
“Copyright ©2020 Pirate Bay.”
