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 18 years after it first appeared online, the site still attracts millions of visitors.
Pirate Bay Domains Expired
During most of its history, the site has operated from ThePirateBay.org domain. However, the official TPB-team also owned ThePirateBay.com and PirateBay.org. The past tense refers to the fact that ‘someone’ didn’t renew these domains last year.
The domains were never actively used but they clearly have value. They were picked up by Dropcatch.com – a service that specializes in securing ‘lapsed’ domains – and were subsequently put up for auction. PirateBay.org sold for $50,000 and ThePiratebay.com brought in a healthy $35,150.
This is a lot of money for a domain name and many people wondered what the motivation of the anonymous buyers was. Soon after PirateBay.org was sold it started promoting the ‘Torrent Man’ movie. This appeared to be a link-building stunt after which the domain was redirected to a Pirate Bay proxy service.
ThePirateBay.com followed a different path. After it was bought at auction it was parked at Sedo and monetized through an advertising feed. This isn’t uncommon for domains that have a reasonable amount of type-in traffic.
ThePirateBay.com is For Sale
This week, however, PirateBay.com was listed for sale again. The seller is asking $38,000, which is slightly more than what was paid last year.
TorrentFreak managed to track down the seller who agreed to comment on the record, provided he remains anonymous. We were interested in the decision to sell the domain but also wanted to know why he paid tens of thousands of dollars for it last year.
The decision, perhaps unexpectedly, was profit-driven. The seller – let’s call him Antonio – never planned to enter the piracy business. He merely picked it up for the traffic.
“I knew it would receive a very large volume of type-in traffic from people mistakenly typing thepiratebay.com instead of thepiratebay.org,” Antonio tells us.
Legal Download Site
Since the ‘Pirate Bay’ audience is generally interested in downloading things, Antonio hoped to turn it into a legal download site. That would bring in more revenue than a standard advertising feed.
However, Antonio never managed to get that off the ground. And since others may have a better use for it, he decided to put it up for sale again.
“I had big plans to develop a legal download site similar to softonic.com or download.cnet.com, but due to other commitments/projects, I’ve not had the time. Although it earns pretty well being parked at Sedo, I think parking it is a waste for such a valuable domain, so I decided to list it for sale.”
Antonio didn’t mention how much revenue the domain brought in over the past year. However, it seems unlikely that it made thousands of dollars a month, or else it wouldn’t be listed for sale.
Interestingly, people who are interested in ThePirateBay.com don’t have to buy it outright. If they don’t have that cash on hand, renting is an option as well for ‘just’ $7,000 per month.
