This is wonderful sage advice:<p>> <i>Google Adsense was profitable on the site for many years, earning me some really nice pay checks here and there. That is, until I got my Adsense account banned by trying out some too good to be true website purchases that turned out to be using fraudulent clicks. Since there there has been next to no profit, and that was years ago.</i><p>Be <i>very</i> cautious about services in that field as there are lots of shady things going on, and the ban hammer falls hard, and there's often no remaining options if you lose adsense.
Is there a particular reason why you chose not to pass the torch? Too few users at this point? Most of the torrents having no seeders?<p>In any case, your story reminds me of the good ol' days of the web. Back in high school, being able to just put up a cool site and have people magically find it through Google felt like god mode. I never ran anything big like your torrent site (which I'm pretty sure I've visited), but I imagine you got a lot of satisfaction out of having thousands of users.<p>I miss the days when the web was this simple. Now I constantly question the time investment of creating a website because the (im)material condition has changed so much; the search algorithm is completely different and so many people use a small handful of platforms. Unless you generate eye candy and it goes viral, or it competes with major internet companies, I'm under the impression that you can just forget it.
Hey, congrats on this project which, as you say, has been a big part of your life. I can really emphasise with that, having run (and shut down) a couple of larger projects previously that were used by a great many people. It's tough to let go sometimes!<p>Kudos to you for bringing something into the world that did something meaningful. Not to mention all the tangential benefits you mention like learning SEO, hosting, and so on. As good as a degree but without all the drinking.
What I don't get is how this big company called Google can get so big by scraping everyone's data and then indexing it without paying people. And then they have the balls to lock people out from adsense profits if the user makes the tiniest mistake.<p>I made a few thousand on YouTube in 2011 I believe and then got heavily into web development. In 2015ish I placed some ugly adsense ads on a site I had and was only a couple dollars away from $100 payout. So... I manually clicked an ad like less then 10 times. Sure enough my account got banned from adsense.<p>It got me completely demotivated from programming and only last year did I pick back up programming. I was using Node.js and Go back then but I'm now into Rust and Erlang. Not sure how I can profit as I lack work history (giving up on self teaching myself programming also meant I took up dead end jobs), but I'm motivated nonetheless. Google, pick on someone your own size.
Man my heart goes out to you.<p>I owned and operated an adult website for 18 years. For 15 of those years it was primary source of income. It was completely lawful and above board, no user-generated-content so I never once had any issues with controversial content etc. One day last year we get a notice from our bank telling us that we were deemed "high risk" and they were closing our commercial accounts. For months we tried to find any bank or credit union that would take us but they all turned us down.<p>Someone actually posted our story to HN but it's not really tech related so didn't get many upvotes or engagement.<p>So I know how devastating it is for ignorance and stupidity on the part of the others to shut down something that a) you worked hard to create yourself and b) was such a huge part of your life for so long. Extreme empathy.
Hey, I remember this site! Definitely a cool place, when I was in high school and interested in technology and P2P it gave me a place to find torrents to experiment with, without the risk of getting in trouble with my parents over illegal downloads. Also found some cool open source software and CC-licensed music (mostly nerdcore rap lol) in the process.
> I was super cheap back then, not even wanting to shell out for a domain name, so the original URL was virtenu.dyndns.org/lt. Eventually I bought the .info for $0.99 after the site picked up some speed a few months later.<p>> I ran it out of my bedroom at my parents house for a long time, eventually switching over to a VPS sometime when I moved out.<p>This brings back many memories from my high school and early college days. I used to run a file and image hosting site (legal content only), and it's amusing to think about the lengths I went to save money. My domain purchase (.com for $8/year or so) felt like a significant investment. I managed to host the site with a considerable number of users out of my parent's basement on a 768kbps upload DSL connection for several years. Eventually, I migrated to a VPS that cost me around $20/month.<p>I ended up selling the site to another hosting service for approximately $700 because it became too much work. In retrospect, I'm guessing it was a no-brainer move for them since they acquired something like 10k users for $700, but from my perspective, I was happy to receive $700.
This is really interesting. You said your brother helped out by posting comments to make it seem more active, do you think that was an important part of its success? I always wonder how sites like this get over the initial evil cycle of no users => no one wants to use it => no users etc.
The Web Sherrif<p><a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/07/web-sheriff-accuses-us-breaking-basically-every-possible-law-pointing-out-that-abusing-dmca-takedowns/" rel="nofollow">https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/07/web-sheriff-accuses-us-b...</a>
Awww. I love this. Thanks so much for telling your story. And I love that this was part of what got you into the field.<p>In case others are curious to see what it looked like while in operation, here's the Wayback Machine: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.legittorrents.info/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.legittorrents.info...</a>
Fun story and experience.<p>> That is, until I got my Adsense account banned by trying out some too good to be true website purchases that turned out to be using fraudulent clicks.<p>What does that "website purchases" mean?
I love stories like these. Just a hacker doing some hacking.<p>"The early days was where a lot of time was spent trying to tell people about the website. Some of my fondest memories are of being at school on Digg.com (back before the v4 fiasco of course) and posting comments to the Upcoming / Hot section where stories were at right before they hit the front page. Almost always the first comments in the thread would become the top comments, with no way to sort, and I would always sign my comment with legittorrents.info. Then later I would come back and check the Google Analytics stats to see those sweet sweet traffic spikes."<p>This is GENIUS. It's a shame signatures are dead now, I kind of liked them when they weren't annoying.<p>"I cannot state enough how much I learned from running this site and others. Way better than a degree in my opinion."<p>It's funny how often this works out like this. I think you can "make it" in software with either hobby experience or a formal degree, and of the two I think the hobby experience is a lot more likely to make you good at "shipping". But the context you get out of a CS degree is super helpful because it compliments your actual work in a thousand tiny (or big, depending on the topic) ways. (Writing CRUD apps is probably not going to flex your CS degree but if someone asks you to optimize a database query, suddenly that second databases class you took about query planners and db internals is suddenly really helpful context.) But I agree with the sentiment here where having hobby experience on top of your CS degree is rocket fuel for your career.<p>"I was super cheap back then, not even wanting to shell out for a domain name, so the original URL was virtenu.dyndns.org/lt. Eventually I bought the .info for $0.99 after the site picked up some speed a few months later."<p>Compared to how easy it is to be wasteful nowadays, there's still really something to be said for intentionally running things on a shoestring budget. (And sometimes we convince ourselves you practically have to be wasteful... isn't running a $20/mo managed k8s + load balancer setup table stakes nowadays?? and you've got to have a hip new $40/yr TLD and don't forget to factor in that surprise big egress bandwidth bill you're gonna accidentally incur at some point).<p>Crazy how much you can do with a $5 VPS and an app server, distributed as a package for your OS's package manager, running as a systemd service. Even just adding a container runtime can be a surprising additional amount of complexity.
Super cool trip down memory lane. I remember finding your site eons ago when I was in high school too.<p>It's cool seeing some of the most popular shows there like Revision3, it reminds me of Digg, Kevin Rose and my favorite online show, thebroken. Really cool period in internet history. Thanks for hosting for so long!
Closing a chapter is always hard but exciting as it opens up time to try something new. Good luck!<p>ps. if you could make the images link to source and it's going to take less than a minute of your time, it may be worth it :)
The second I clicked in here, I immediately remembered your website. (That green theme is very iconic and memorable). When I was a young teenager, I remember visiting your site plenty of times and downloading things off of it. Probably something like Linux ISOs, or music. I was a nerdy kid who really liked the idea of peer to peer stuff, I guess.<p>I probably tried to contribute some RuneScape-related content, but it likely didn't stay seeded for long haha.<p>Thanks for maintaining such a great website.
I've been helping law enforcement to harvest torrent seeders for the last 10 years. LT is on my list. If there is someone in the world who owns one of the biggest torrent databases, probably it's me
Advice for people wanting to earn money on ads: Don't use adsense. Make a list of companies that might be interested in advertising on your website, then start making calls.<p>Advertisers have the same problem. Adwords sucks. Facebook ads sucks and are very expensive. There are few alternatives so it's an easy sell.
With the GPT's taking over Google, I wonder when web devs will feel nostalgia about the SEO-days...<p>> <i>my first exposures to implementing SEO (what I now do for a living), which funny enough was mostly copied tags from The Pirate Bay and modified to be about legal torrents instead</i><p>It's already starting to feel nostalgic.
I'll keep saying this as long as I observe it:<p>there's a strong intention against free digital assets.<p>the logic of the market is imposing itself over the digital realm (the inside of the internet?)<p>this logic wants us to pay to copy. why should only some get to keep the enormous advantage unlocked by digital information while the rest are forced to pay?<p>to be fair this is also in reaction to <a href="https://torrentfreak.com/brazils-ministry-of-justice-asks-go" rel="nofollow">https://torrentfreak.com/brazils-ministry-of-justice-asks-go</a>...