Anodyne isn’t the first game to have advertised on The Pirate Bay. That was a road famously paved by McPixel. But developer Sean Hogan has just published the results of the campaign, and they make for some very interesting reading. Advertising to so-called pirates once again has proven itself very effective.

While The Pirate Bay is “blocked” in the UK, anyone with a mind and Google can still find the torrent linking site easily enough. And in less censorious countries, the entirely legitimate site can be accessed by all. Those who have may have noticed, while browsing for entirely legitimate and non-copyright violating torrents that it occasionally becomes The Promo Bay, with advertising instead of the site’s usual logo. That’s something Hogan took advantage of with his RPG Anodyne.

The promotion was free – The Pirate Bay didn’t charge for the 72 hours the game was advertised on the site. So how did it work out?

Pretty damned well. First of all their Greenlight hugely increased in views. From 28,000 to 41,000, pushing them to 59th place. The game is on sale in a number of places, the page TPB pointed to primarily pushing the Humble Store purchase options, as well as linking to Desura and GamersGate. During the three day promotion, they saw around $11,500 come in via Humble, $577 from Fastspring, around $200 from Desura and GamersGate, about $100 in BitCoin donations, and around $175 for the soundtrack on BandCamp. So that’s a total of $12,552 for the two-man indie team.

To put that in perspective, in the ten days beforehand (during which the game received coverage and thus incoming traffic) they had 40,000 unique visitors to their website, and sold around 900 copies – the three days of the promo saw double the revenue of those previous ten days.

They also saw 240,000 unique visitors come to their site, both through TPB and a Reddit thread about it all. Social network views improved greatly too, and they saw their release trailer tip over 100,000 views.

All of which makes one rather important point: advertising to so-called pirates makes money. Developers: your audience is as big as you’ll let it be.

Cheers, Develop.