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Ask HN: What about a paid torrent search engine?

6 points by onebyzero2506 ↗ HN
A year ago, skytorrents (skytorrents.in) was launched with the promise of being ad-free. They started paying server bills from their pockets but due to its massive accumulated popularity, they turned towards donations.

Well, that also did not help much and they have shut down their website. My question is instead of donations, why not a subscription model? I would be happy to pay a dollar per month for that service. I know that this is not an out of the box idea and I am just curious about problems of this.

Related Article: https://torrentfreak.com/skytorrents-dumps-massive-torrent-database-and-shuts-down180221/

Mirror site: https://skytorrents.lol/ (I assume they are probably using the skytorrent torrent dump)

4 comments

[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 16.6 ms ] thread
Cypher
paywalls don't work, the conversation rate is 1-2%
WhiteOwlLion
You expect people that want copyright content for free to pay for a service that links to copyright content? Wrong audience... Some other ideas:

1) mine crypto for you via CoinHive to get access to torrent file downloads. 1,000 hashes to download one torrent file. you can further the idea and people can trade 1k hashes for one torrent download per "account", so they can build up an account with you to use 2) go to crypto faucet and submit payment to your wallet 3) run ads but has to unobtrusive since google chrome will block annoying ads

as for hosting cost, you can try offsetting some bandwidth by using IPFS for web pages and/or torrent file themselves. keep your costs down and you might be able to run lean and actually pay for your dedicated server cost. check out ovh or online.net

imhoguy
1) torrents mean free stuff therefore nobody wants to pay 2) service cost of processing $1 payment would consume (most of) it probably 3) low trust

It still amazes me why BitTorrent hasn't got standarized distributed index yet. But there is a hope in Tribler research project: https://torrentfreak.com/researchers-use-a-blockchain-to-boo...

echan00
In contrast to the other responses, I actually think this is not a bad idea. Doesn't it exist already in the form of private torrent trackers? I do not pay for usenet, but it sounds similar.