After some internal discussions and some talks with AdultKing we've come up with a solution.
But first let me point out that PlugRush has never supported pirate sites or ignored reports about pirate sites. We have banned tons of accounts with sites that distribute pirated content. We do take piracy seriously and do not support that way of generating revenue from porn. We ourselves have ran an adult network of affiliate sites for almost ten years and have always done things the right way by using promo content and sending traffic to paysites to generate sales.
We've always taken reports seriously and banned sites that gets reported. When AdultKing started making this thread here, we thought it was without him even trying to contact us or report anything to us. Personally it kinda pissed me off. We're not hard to reach, and we don't mind banning pirates. So we feel it would have been easy to get in touch with us if it was really that big of a concern for you.
Pirate spreading sites is a very small percentage of the sites in plugrush. We have almost 80 thousand registered sites. We wouldn't mind banning all of them. Most of the ones we've found or have gotten reported, are sites with close to no traffic. Very few of them have any substansial amount, so it has never been a priority for us to activly filter them out.
After reading about us supposedly ignoring reports, we started looking into it closer. We searched our email and only found 1 email from may 26th from AdultKing. After talking to him today the only thing we can conclude with is that they must have gone to spam. We did not have a filter to make sure emails didn't go to spam. All the report emails contains a lot of links, so google might have threated them as spam, understandably. We've created a filter to prevent this from happening from now on.
But our way of dealing with pirates and how we disable their account but not the adzones has apparently not been good enough according to AdultKing and other parties, and some have claimed this is not really what we're doing and that we are still selling those clicks. To really show how we stand in this situation we have decided to do some changes. We do not want people to think we are a pirate friendly network, and since there seems to be people who think we are, we have made plans to more actively show where we stand.
Together with AdultKing we've worked out a solution I think everyone will be happy with. There seem to be a strong opinion amongst people that it will help to try to educate users about why they shouldn't download porn for free from file lockers. While we don't think it will do much good, we are willing to give it a try, since there seem to be a strong opinion amongs people that it will some how have an effect. So what we will do is launch a campaign against stealing porn. We're launching the site DontStealPorn.com, and on all disabled widgets on sites we get reports about piracy and links only leading to file lockers, we will display a message saying "Warning! {$domain} contains pirated content. Don't Steal Porn!" with a link to the campaign site. Example:
http://www.camelmedia.net/snagit/55060000110237.png
Links on Plugs in those widget will not contain our tracking codes, they will link directly to the advertisers sites. This way it will be impossible for us to still sell the clicks, and pirates will not benefit from it. Some might see this as someone still benefiting from piracy, since the advertisers will still receive traffic, but some of those advertisers will be content producers that have paysites and advertise on our network, the very people who's business AdultKing is trying to fight for, and we believe that it's important to let the users have the possibility to click themselves away from sites with pirated content. So this should be a good thing for both the users and content producers. Users will also have the option to get educated if they read the message and click through to the campaign site.
Hopefully everyone can agree that this is a satisfying solution to all parties involved, and we can live in peace and without the drama. We all want the same thing, and are all on the same site. We just have different opinions on what will work, and how to solve things.