this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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Yeah I mean obviously? YouTube pays to serve video. pirating sites serve no video and dont produce any content no dev team because its a copy paste open source implementation.
Uh, you gotta pay hosting somehow, so most piracy sites rely on ad revenue to exist. It's less overhead, but it ain't completely free.
and the plus side you dont need to us 1 pirating site, there are many, if you plan to stream the pirate material instead of downloading.
Most piracy sites don’t host anything besides a simple frontend, they just embed videos from a variety of other websites nobody would deign use directly, because those sure as hell do have worse ads than youtube.
What you are describing is alternative frontend, not a piracy site. Alternative frontends hold no unauthorized copy of content. They can potentially infringe copyright by claiming authorship of content. That would make them fall under piracy from the legal standpoint but I never seen such sites.
Piracy normally implies content is physically located on site’s servers. This requires significant infrastructure for storage and content delivery.
Whether they are or not doesnt matter, everyone calls them so and it’s almost certainly the kind of sites the OP had in mind.
No shit. It costs less to run than youtube which is why they run less ads
Yeah, but surely they have much more limited ad revenue than YouTube, given that a lot of the ads I see on those sites are ones that pay out less (like the shitty porn ads). Personally, I suspect it's actually competition between piracy sites that has lowered the overall ads, because you have more choices than just one in comparison to YouTube, where you can use it or leave it.
I suspect they just make more than enough by donations and promoting their seedbox or IPTV services than they get by using google ads.
Nominally? For sure. What about per user? Maybe, or maybe Youtube uses more resources than it should.
Also we are comparing different kind of platforms. Youtube is video sharing platform. Any “creative individual” can post there 24/7 any nonsense. Piracy sites are about licensed paid content, so comparison should be against say Netflix.
Youtube’s competitor is PeerTube which has 0 ads whatsoever
I agree but im not drawing the comparison. The meme is drawing that comparison I am just saying why I dont think its so ridiculous for youtube to run more ads than a piracy site.
Yeah, that’s on meme, I’m not accusing you of anything.
On ridiculousness part let me politely disagree. They don’t need so much ads, their revenue was around 25 billion in 2023. There are no official numbers on costs but guesstimations I saw around 14 billion (infra plus operational) so they could lower number of ads to 2/3 and still be very much profitable. They just won’t because people accepted it
Idk I saw that there margins were estimated to be around 10-30% and their ads revenue isnt set in stone they can only make a projection of what they expect it to be and hope it comes in at that or over. I think they are running as many ads as they can because they need extra money for AI capex. Its all speculation though no one knows their actual costs.
Back in the day, piracy sites were relatively flooded with ads. Being exposed to many&sketchy ads was part of the cost of 'free' while the official sites had fewer and had higher standards for what advertisers they allowed.
Now piracy sites have a few annoying banners and fake download buttons, but it's mostly just porn. Meanwhile the real sites are plastered to the point where content is crowded out and like 3/4ths of the ads are scams. There's one on YouTube right now about a miracle disease cure claiming to be in the bible and it's been running for over two weeks now; not to mention all the AI slop scams and malware.
It's kind of absurd how shit the web has gotten as it was corporatized and monetized. Even the word "web" hardly applies anymore.
Many have forgotten what was lost, or never knew. Cyberspace was wonderful once.
There are pirate sites that do video streaming
Neither youtube does, at least piracy sites have to find a way to rip the vids
Which is true only for a few sites and many low quality ones
and you forgot that you need to pay money to host the site server and pay for the domain name
I did forget about the ones that stream video but those do not contain less ads than youtube so I think its safe to say the meme wasnt reference those sites. Also this is just nitpicking, there is no argument between the cost to run a pirating site that hosts links to torrents and youtube therefore it makes sense why youtube would need to run more ads.
It's easy to forget, but the vast majority of people, especially young people, mean pirate streaming sites when they say piracy.
Even the piracy subreddit seems to be mostly about them after the great Exodus.
They seem to be under the impression that those are somehow safer than torrenting, despite the opposite being true. Though I guess they're right about there being more to learn about torrents and other methods.
It hits me like a slap every time piracy comes up in conversation we'll start to get into it when they ask me what site I use to watch things. I Once answered "jellyfin?" With some confusion before they brought up like hanime or some shit. Illegal streaming sites with mountains of ads are what most people mean when they say "piracy". It's the only piracy that can really access on their iPhone anyway.
I thought the meme was about ads on torrent tracker sites.
In theory, copyright infringement is committed by the uploader, not the downloader. As such, torrenting is more dangerous if you allow it to seed instead of just leach.
Depends on the country
I mean there's more malicious threat actors involved in pirate streaming largely because it's actually very expensive to do. People aren't as likely to do it out of spite or a desire to share like on torrent sites. They must stay profitable against all odds or likely get arrested.
The ads on pirate streaming sites are often the worst out there. It's one of the few places you're still likely to find malicious code hidden in popup or banner ads. Everything else has gotten too corporate for that.
And if getting caught is what scares you about torrenting you can actually just not seed. It is an option, it's just a bit rude. Certainly not more rude than just expecting someone else to host a free streaming site for you and not try to steal your data/money/identity though.
I'm actually pretty sure this meme was made about pirate streaming sites. Hence the direct comparison saying that streaming sites inject more ads in the same way that pirate sites do. In fact I've seen almost this exact meme on Reddit and the every comment in that thread was about streaming sites because that's what they all assumed it was about, because that's what piracy is to them. I was being quite literal and direct when I brought up Reddit's take on this.
But there's so much else to pirate: games, books, music, roms. There's a wide world of content out there! (Obligatory don't pirate stuff, visit your local library and ask a librarian to hook you up. Or do. Whatever, IAALIANYL[I Am A Librarian I Am Not Your Librarian.])
I'm not saying what people should do, I'm just reporting on trends.
Pirate streaming is the bulk of piracy. Especially when you include sports. Most people just aren't tech savvy enough for torrents anymore. The next generation never learned computers. They don't torrent.
the_joke.jpg
Nah people here are brainwormed on anything to do with money and interpret this as piracy sites being better than youtube because they run less ads.
I think it's better because piracy sites aren't flooded with fake Ai soundtracks, fake videos and bullshit. People want authenticity and truthfulness.
ads? What is this, 2013?
Do you people not use ublock?
Its better because you get high quality content for free but thats not what was ment. It was comparing yt vs piracy sites and saying that google is choosing to run more ads. I'm saying not really it just costs way more so more ads need to be ran.
But yeah I run adblock but most users dont.
Fewer
Yes, they run less fewer too.
Uhhh. Downloading a full video file is much more resource intensive than watching a video on YouTube. YouTube uses compression, bitrate, etc to limit how much data is sent. Pirating sites can’t do that, they have to send the full file.
Are you trolling?
In what way would I be trolling. A full video file, say you’re watching the Olympics, will be tens of gigabytes. That same file streamed will be maybe 200mb after compression and bit rate changes for your browser.
Because both sites there are serving compressed video and also because those type of sites absolutely do not have less ads than youtube. Every inch of screenspace is taken up by ads and you need to click 3 ads just to adjust the volume. So I dont think the meme wasnt referring to video streaming sites and was instead referring to piracy sites that host links to torrents which incurs very little running costs compared to youtube.
both sites where? are you talking about some specific sites you have in your mind instead of the topic of discussion? I never once mentioned video streaming sites, besides youtube. And I wasn't referring to torrents either. Sites like Anna's Archive (the largest pirate database on the web) hosts their files. If you download from them you are downloading the full file, no compression besides maybe gzip. Usenet, you are downloading the full file, no compression again, besides gzip or whatever compression the uploader used. With usenet at least you'll be pulling from a host rather than the site that has the links, but the content is still being downloaded. Downloading the full file is always more resource intensive than watching a streamed version. That's why Youtube doesn't want you streaming in 4k or high bitrates. It's literally why YouTube Premium exists.
I assumed video because the comparison is youtube. AA isnt really what was in mind because they are more of a book archiving site with slow capped direct downloads than video torrents but its along the lines of my point that their cost is far lower than YouTube so you'd expect them to run less ads.
Most of the pirated content is being served is via torrents which allow serving content cheaper than YouTube because the cost is distributed across the users in the network. This content is being encoded into efficient formats same as YouTube. There just isnt sites that cost more to operate than YouTube. except Vimeo i guess. Stuff lile 123 movies, no one would ever even try claim that has less ads than YouTube and it servers a shitter more compressed less reliable video stream.