World’s most popular torrent site gets less than 50 cents in donations each day

The world’s most popular torrent sites has netted less than 50 cents per day in donations since it started accepting Bitcoin back in November, 2013.

As pointed out by TorrentFreak, the total received by KickAssTorrents’ public bitcoin address is just 0.96 of a single bitcoin, which at today’s exchange rate puts its value at around $430. Divide $430 by the 900 or so days the site has been accepting bitcoin and you’ll find it’s less than 50 cents per day in donations.

This, perhaps, isn’t all that surprising. While community driven operations such as KAT are incredibly popular when measured by traffic – SimilarWeb’s figures put KAT.cr at nearly 610 million visitors for March, 2016 – if people are willing to pay to support their media consumption habit, then there’s a good chance that the overlap of people who download copyrighted material for free but also have monthly commitments to services like Spotify or Netflix is pretty small.

Of course, the overly complex and profit-squeezing approach to global licensing agreements don’t help the situation much. In some situations, people are more than happy to pay for legitimate services but they’re simply not available.

While KAT doesn’t seem to have an overly generous pool of users supporting it – most of its revenue will come through ads served on the site – The Pirate Bay rakes in a whopping $9 per day. KAT doesn’t promote its donation option, however. It’s buried in response to a question on the FAQ page.