One day I was browsing my favorite torrent site looking for more educational resources on web development and computer programming when I came across the two most popular/most seeded books on their site. The books were listed as “Most wished for gifts in electronics” and “Most wished for gifts is Jewellry”. These books were downloaded so many times more then any of the other files I had to see what it was all about.

To my surprise when I opened the file all it was was  listings/product shots and descriptions of the 50 most selling items at the amazon website.  Also what I found interesting was that when I clicked on a product it took me to a page linked directly to a location where I could buy this product. Genius! (Do you see how the money is made yet)?

Let me explain. Amazon provides a sales commision on any referals that lead to a sale. The rates start at 4% and depending on the products and the number of previous referalls you’ve made it can climb to upwards of 10% . This PDF is basically an online flyer that is distributed for free over the torrent network and because the topics were interesting to the market they spread like wild flyers (flowers).

So how much money is involved? Well from that one site alone each file was downloaded over 10,000 times (there’s 2 files so lets assume 20,000 views). Of those 20,000 not everyone is going to click through to the amazon page but from my experience it has a pretty high rate of return so lets say 10,000 people click through.  Of these you need to think about how many people actuallly bougth product this way. My assumtion is that that number is somewhere between 100 and 500. Anything else just seems to large. Now we need to estimate how much money was made per sale. I’m going to assume an average commision rate of 8% as after only 7 sales your minimum paymet is already bumped up to 6% so at that volume it is reasonable to assume at least 8%. Now the average prices of most of these items range from 100-500 dollars each. I would estimate that per item sold you could stand to make anywhere from 10-50 dollars. (side note: You also are not limited to the items on the list. You make money from any sale that is made as a result of your clicks). So at 10-50 dollars per sale by 100-500 items sold, profits we’re like to range from 1000 to 20000 dollars!!!!!! Not bad considering I felt I could probably have made that pdf file in under an hour.

Any guesses what I did? I Made my own PDF book of course.

Time spent developing page: 1 Hour

Time spent distributin: 1/2 hour

Results: After producing a simple flyer, (my title: Absolutely Amazing gifts for geeks) I began distributing it on just one torrent site. Within 3 hours I had over 200 downloads. I was soooo excited, I was going to be rich! By the end of the first 24 hours I had over 1000 downloads! 2 hours later my torrent file has been removed from the index ???

why you ask??? well I can speculate with 2 main theories. Theory one is I violated the user agreement by distributing a file blatantly designed for generating revenue. I could argue that I was providing valuable consumer information for the public but its week. Theory two is that those top two pdf files were owned by the producer of the torrent site and they wouldn’t want any competition for clicks and revenue. Either way I got shut down pretty quickly.

Money Made to date: 0$

Ways to improve for next time. 

-Product a higher quality document that provides more value for the users -reviews, descriptions, etc.
-Distribute it across multiple torrent platforms, results in larger distribution and more
stability in case one shuts me down.

Hope this encourages you to try some ideas out for yourself.

Vaughan.