this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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me_irl
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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.