{"id":1001215,"date":"2008-06-01T22:24:23","date_gmt":"2008-06-02T03:24:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/?p=1001215"},"modified":"2008-06-01T22:24:23","modified_gmt":"2008-06-02T03:24:23","slug":"the-pirate-bay-goes-mainstream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/economics\/2008\/06\/01\/the-pirate-bay-goes-mainstream\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pirate Bay Goes Mainstream"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Used to be the Pirate Bay posted ads for gambling, borderline porn, and questionable dating sites; the real bottom feeders of Internet businesses. Then I started using <a href=\"http:\/\/adblockplus.org\/en\/\">Adblock Plus<\/a>; and didn&#8217;t see ads at all. :-)<\/p>\n<p>However I just happened to be using Safari for a few minutes while Firefox downloaded an extension update, and followed a link that happened to point into the Pirate Bay, and I was quite surprised to see this:<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<p><a href='http:\/\/thepiratebay.org\/search\/mediadefender\/0\/99\/0'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/06\/piratebayads-900x576.png\" alt=\"Search on MediaDefender at The Pirate Bay; 4 ads from American Apparel. AT&amp;T et al\" title=\"piratebayads\" width=\"900\" height=\"576\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-1001216\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/06\/piratebayads-900x576.png 900w, https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/06\/piratebayads-150x96.png 150w, https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/06\/piratebayads.png 1286w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>OK, Web Media Player and LowerMyBills.com aren&#8217;t Nordstroms, but they aren&#8217;t the bottom of the barrel either.  American Apparel and AT&amp;T are major name brands. The ads seem to be served by a couple of different ad networks:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Burst Media<\/li>\n<li>Interclick<\/li>\n<li>Doubleclick (now part of Google)<\/li>\n<li>ad{net}<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> I wonder if the advertisers know where their ads are playing? Or if they care? <\/p>\n<p>Possibly the subject you&#8217;re searching for matters too. The Pirate Bay seems to be embedding the URL of the main page in the URLs that one clicks through to the ads. I just checked and the pages for subjects like &#8220;Top 100 TV Shows&#8221; still have the &#8220;dating&#8221; site ads and flashing &#8220;If this ad is flashing, you&#8217;re a winner&#8221; ads. Maybe they only use legitimate ads on the individual search result pages? <\/p>\n<p>I experimented by <a href=\"http:\/\/thepiratebay.org\/search\/lexi%20belle\/0\/99\/0\">searching for a popular porn star&#8217;s name<\/a>, and up came a page with two &#8220;dating&#8221; ads, one completely deceptive ad from the Online Reward Center, complete with pop-ups, and one ad from the Mormons asking &#8220;Does God really care?&#8221; (Hmm, I wonder what the answer is? I better click it to find out.) So at least some pages still have 100% scammy advertising. <\/p>\n<p>I tried a slightly less loaded search term (<a href=\"http:\/\/thepiratebay.org\/search\/harry%20potter\/0\/99\/0\">Harry Potter<\/a>) and this time I got back an ad for American Apparel again, and one flashing &#8220;Congratulations! You are the 999,999th visitor!&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>So there are still plenty of scams to go around, but at least some advertisers are starting to take the Pirate Bay seriously. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Used to be the Pirate Bay posted ads for gambling, borderline porn, and questionable dating sites; the real bottom feeders of Internet businesses. Then I started using Adblock Plus; and didn&#8217;t see ads at all. :-) However I just happened to be using Safari for a few minutes while Firefox downloaded an extension update, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1001215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1001215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1001215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1001215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1001215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}