Apparently, there's a rumor circulating that The Pirate Bay might shut down soon. Various news sites have been speculating about the demise of the popular torrent site and what may happen next... Could Donald Trump be the one to pull the trigger?

No, Trump personally can’t and won’t shut down The Pirate Bay. Period.

Excuse me for the clickbait title and the strange intro, but since it’s the topic of this opinion piece, I thought it was warranted.

Here’s what’s going on.

The torrent community is in turmoil after the shutdowns of KAT and Torrentz. We’ve written about this extensively, but there’s a rather frustrating side-effect that we haven’t discussed so far.

For some reason there’s a slew of news sites, prominently featured in search engines and on social media, that keep spreading fear and panic about a looming Pirate Bay shutdown.

These publications take every piece of file-sharing related news, often sourced from TorrentFreak, and rewrite it in a way that suggests the world’s number one torrent site may disappear, or is already gone.

Here are just a few headlines I’ve seen over the past few days. Click on the links at your own risk.

Pirate Bay, Extra Torrent Shutting Down; Fans In Search For Best Torrent Alternative (link)

The Pirate Bay (TPB) Shut Down Imminent After Service Partner Faces Piracy Lawsuit (link)

Goodbye The Pirate Bay? Cloudflare Under Fire For Helping TPB, Terror Groups (link)

The Pirate Bay to shut down soon? (link)

The Pirate Bay Shut Down Rumors: Once Site Goes Down, US Library Of Congress Might Be The Next Piracy Haven (link)

Pirate Bay to Shut Down…



The Pirate Bay To Shut Down Soon As Excipio Starts To Shoot And Kill Torrent Sites? (link)

TPB Now Leads The Pack Of Torrent Sites, But Might Shut Down Soon? List Of Top Torrent Sites Inside (link)

The Pirate Bay (TPB), KickassTorrents, Torrentz Shut Down: US Library of Congress As Next Alternative? (link)

These reports have absolutely nothing to do with an apparent Pirate Bay shutdown of course.

The last one, for example, bizarrely connects concerns the RIAA has about access to digital works at the Library of Congress, to the potential demise of TPB, which is pure nonsense.

Pirate Bay Declared Dead



Many other articles follow the same format, writing nonsensical trash such as the following:

“Other torrent sites such as TorrentFreak is not happy with the growing population of The Pirate Bay but they do appreciate the role that TPB is playing in the world of torrent sites.”

The quote above comes from The Parent Herald, which also suggests that copyright trolls plan to fine The Pirate Bay. Clearly, they have not read the TorrentFreak article on the topic, which they’re quoting, or they simply don’t understand it.

Might Shut Down Soon?



So why are these “news” sites reporting this type of doom and gloom? The short answer is ad views. The clickbait articles are shared on social media, appear in Google news and in search results.

The latter can bring in thousands of views. If people Google for “The Pirate Bay,” these headlines are featured as “news” and beg to be clicked on, generating revenue for the sites in question. For the very same reason you’ll see numerous articles about KAT and Torrentz alternatives.

Click, Click, Click



Why are we complaining about this? Well, these news reports are picked up by other sites and shared among thousands of people. At TorrentFreak we do our best to report news as accurately as possible, and these clickbait articles go directly against this, often using our name.

We have addressed the clickbait issue in the past but in recent months it has gotten much worse.

While there are many different sites guilty of this practice, we recently stumbled upon a ring of related publications that all belong to the same company. They carry names such as Parent Herald, iSports Times., University Herald, Mobile&Apps , Game&Guide and share a similar layout and design.

The owner in question, according to the copyright statement, is the New York based company IQ Adnet, which is… surprise surprise, an ad network that specializes in premium digital and native advertising. That explains everything.

There’s not much we can do about this, unfortunately, besides telling people what’s really going on and venting our frustration every now and then.

In the meantime, we’ll be waiting for these sites to pick up the Trump angle, which shouldn’t take long.

Update: It only took a few hours…

Update: Apologies. Mobile&Apps was inaccurately linked to IQ Adnet. We confused it with Game&Guide which is not corrected above.

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For the record. At TorrentFreak we don’t use pay per view ads, partly to get rid of the pageview obsession. This means that the clickbait title we used for this article doesn’t bring in any extra money.