Targetpoint grabs Empornium
p2p news / p2pnet: Interesting developments at one of the largest porn torrent sites on the net.
Targetpoint, an Israeli advertising company, took over Empornium, changed the design and locked out the former site admins.
Just a couple of days ago Empornium’s redesign was introduced and site features (signup and search engine) have been made pay-only and because of these changes, some of the admins and contributors have left empornium and moved to a new site called cheggit.net.
In the meanwhile, there’s a battle on wikipedia on both the empornium and the targetpoint page.
Targetpoint is an active player in the bittorrent community, it provides ads for mininova for example, and a targetpoint reseller has a 37% share in The Piratebay. This is fine because Targetpoint provides these sites with the means to grow.
But we know now that it’s not all good. As reported before, targepoint is actively buying torrent sites, and taking more and more control.
The same happened with Empornium:
Before TargetPoint, Empornium was run by Saz. Saz made a choice to take on investors. By taking a partial buy-in from Targetpoint, the goal was to use their resources to make the site better with better servers, a complete rebuild and a potentially wider audience. This contract gave TargetPoint a lot of legal control over Empornium, including control over the domain. The first thing they did was to put additional ads on the site, which was gernerally acceptable as they didn’t get in the way nor cause problem with using the site. Pushing the Big Cheese Out On Empornium, TargetPoint started making bigger decisions about the site, and started to lock down and control the site more, adding more advertisements and other such things. Saz hadn’t been the sole owner of the site since the initial deal, but only now did that become a problem. After the move to .nl, he no longer had any control over what TargetPoint did with the site.
And now it seems Targetpoint took complete control of Empornium, making more drastic changes and turning it into a paysite. That’s obviously a step too far.
Supporting bittorrent sites is fine, and buying them is OK with me. But turning bittorrent sites into paysites is wrong.
Torrentfreak – The Netherlands
Digg this.
p2pnet newsfeeds for your site.
rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss
Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
July 11th, 2006 at 12:14 pm
Since when can a company charge money for a website full of pirated stuff? We all know all this porn is pirated and unpaid for, hence repressible according to the MPAA who actually shut down many pirated movie site owned by people who didn’t made a cent from it. Yet a company can freely charge people to access their pirated content… what a world we live in!
July 12th, 2006 at 3:43 am
It’s a link site foolio. There is not a single torrent site that contains “pirated material”.
July 12th, 2006 at 3:44 am
Leech away!
July 12th, 2006 at 12:14 pm
There was no actual pirated content on every site busted by the MPAA and the RIAA either, but still they did it.
July 23rd, 2006 at 10:02 pm
Oded Daniel bought 37% of Piratebay in conjunction with Targetpoint. Oded Daniel is close friends with Or Kuntzman, who is CEO of Targetpoint. Targetpoint bought Epornium and they will eventually charge for use. They are a company that deals with illegal download sites, warez, and torrents mainly. Their partners are MIVA, Searchfeed, ABCSearch, and more.