What is the motivation to run this non profit site? I can not believe the motivation can simply be to get subtitles to watch movies personally. I suspect this is not really non profit as there the site supports ads. My guess is the owner is making decent money via ads. To the readers of this comment, if you can make a rough calculation of the ad revenue with good assumptions to validate or invalidate my theory, that would be amazing. Thanks HN
On HN, apparently. See the recent thread on Wordle.
The reality is likely to be: they make a very small amount from ads and user donations that might, if they're lucky, cover the costs of hosting. The warez scene is a subculture and community for the people who participate in it.
It is depressing that HN participants are so often mystified by the idea people might be motivated by intrinsic or social factors to engage in peer-based production (whether legal or not) when so many of the companies they run or work for exist only because of peer-based production efforts like Linux and other FOSS software.
> The reality is likely to be: they make a very small amount from ads and user donations that might, if they're lucky, cover the costs of hosting
Opensubtitles has a VIP program at $15 a year.
It's quite easy to find the person who runs the site and, according to their CV, this is basically their job. That'd make Opensubtitles a for-profit piracy site, i guess.
If in order for opensubtitles to fulfill its envisioned role needs full-time attention, it is legit to pay yourself or hire an employee, paid by the ad and or subscription money. That's what also happens on all registered non-profit organizations.
I don't think they're implying the subtitles themselves are piracy, but the users of opensubtitles.org are overwhelmingly using them for pirated media. The subs are all indexed against scene versions of the video files (as you can tell from their names), and that's what most users are using it for. After all, streaming services, DVDs, and other legitimate ways of consuming these shows/movies already come with subtitles.
No, the 0.1% of subs for obscure indie shows that didn't have native subs doesn't change that.
It takes hours of work to translate one hour of movie, so when a translated subtitle is copied, it is most certainly piracy. If you are faster than that please consider becoming a translator for sites like the TED foundation.
You are overestimating how much ad revenue comes in from non Tier 1 countries and from that specific niche. I'd be surprised if they get more than $1-2 per 1000 visitors. Could be lower than that
Well, not when licensed entertainment is involved. Subtitles may sound harmless but are enough to start a court battle. This happened in Poland with a similar site. I would not dare to claim that authors motives and all actions were clean and done in the open, but for sure they were targeted by various media groups for copyright infringement just because of plain subtitles.
You need resources to deal with that and it's not gonna be a clean fight.
I should have been more clearer. I can understand running a hobby site to chat with fellow hobbyists which is a motivation for socializing. In this case its pretty much static. I fail to understand the motivation.
hahahaha, I know personally owner of the site and trust me it's VERY MUCH for profit site making him decent income for last 15 years living in Thailand travelling around world scubadiving and having fun
it's not just ads, but also paid API access AFAIR
nothing wrong with that, just not sure where you come with idea he would bother, if there would not be good money in it
I've only ever interacted with it after account setup year ago via a rpi running Kodi which automatically downloads subtitles now and then, unless specifically searching for different versions barely remember it exists. I hope they make money somehow but get the feeling it's mostly just a bunch of api leeches like myself.
I don't understand such a website anyway. A website like OpenSubtitles seems like overkill for passing around text and timestamps. Why not use something like GitHub? Why couldn't the project simply be a big git repo? It would even be easier.
This is a little bit like saying Dropbox could just be a git repo. Yes, it could, but normal users don't know how to use git, and it adds features that git by itself doesn't provide.
Not to mention having this on GitHub would probably get taken down almost instantly due to copyright infringement.
