International Business Times is getting ad traffic from The Pirate Bay, Exoclick, directRev, WWWPromoter & Adbrau and others involved [UPDATED]
Recently I was reviewing several of The Pirate Bay's (TPB) new mirror sites that have popped up over the last year since the most recent rounds of raids against the famous website's administrators. These mirrors have been the source of no small controversy - there have been rumors of law enforcement entrapment, that a project once founded in the spirit of breaking down walls to the free transfer of information has been hijacked for nefarious ends. Among these rumors, complaints centered on the advertising schemes used by many of the new Pirate Bay mirrors stand out as being substantial. Even Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde pointed to advertising as one of the critical signs that the site was taking a turn for the worst in a blog post late last year : "TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. Noone willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads....