Let’s be honest, if you had the choice of receiving something for

Method #1 — Ads. As I mentioned earlier, my first attempt at making money online was in the form of advertisements. I’d read how all these websites were making thousands of dollars every month.
Once you have successfully started driving traffic to your website, you can actually begin to make money. Advertising is by far the best way to generate revenue from your website. Some advertising campaigns pay you just for the number of visitors coming to your site while others require that the visitor perform some action (such as make a purchase or click on a link) for you to get paid.

free

How do websites make money #4 – Affiliates. Another way a lot of businesses make money online is through affiliates. If you have ever seen an affiliate ad, you will know it. In the personal finance space, you’ll see this with credit cards. For example, a blogger will write a review of “My favorite credit cards.”.

, or spending your hard earned cash on it, you would opt to save your money.

For movies, (or films, for you ever-stressing film majors out there) it’s streaming sites that make saving your money possible. They are heaven sent.

Sites like Putlocker, Solarmovie , and ProjectFreeTv are more popular than ever right now. They stream thousands of movies and television shows on a daily basis, for free.

But, when you use these sites, and you begin to view a movie that is still in theaters from the comfort of your own living room, an icy cold shiver runs down your back.

You start to think: “Is this illegal? Am I going to prison…for forever?”

You begin to question the legality and structure of these sites, often pondering these questions:

How do these sites work?
Are they legal?
Can I get into legal trouble for viewing movies and tv shows on them? I mean, I’m not downloading anything, right?
And, how do these streaming sites make money? Is there any profit involved for the owners?

It turns out the answers to these questions are pretty difficult to come by.

However, after digging around the dark recesses of the internet, we’ve gathered some data and information to put your mind at ease.

How Do Streaming Sites Work: I Promise, It’s Not Rocket Science

After scouring through many blogs, and searching the far corners of the world for credible articles, we finally stumbled across some useful information on Business Insider, Quora, and The Telegraph.

So, let’s break down how these streaming websites actually work:

The first thing to know is that the streaming sites attempt to avoid legal trouble by never hosting their own content.
Websites such as Solarmovie and ProjectFreeTV act as a search engine for links to streamed content. This content is usually embedded from a secondary website.
When you push the play button on the website, that website requests the file from the second website.
The video content actually exists on that second website, hosted on a server, that you never see.
The server then streams the file back to your computer, bypassing the first website.
The appropriate software decodes and plays the video on your computer.

This is an easy-to-understand explanation for how these streaming websites actually function.

And, now that you know how they work—is it legal?

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Are Streaming Sites Illegal: Am I, Or The Owner, Soon To Be Deported To Azkaban?

Relax, you’re safe from the dementors. I’ll explain.

According to copyright laws, if you were to download even part of a file, it would be called pseudo-streaming. That means you downloaded a copy of copyrighted material, which is illegal.

And if you were to stream content that is shown to a large number of people outside the normal family circle, it also constitutes a copyright violation.

However, if you’re not downloading, or sharing the copyrighted material, accessing streamed content is generally legal for you, the user.

But, if you were uploading or posting unlicensed streamed content, you would be conducting an illegal activity.

The streaming websites try to avoid legal trouble by not hosting their own content. They instead act as a search engine for links to streamed content, usually embedded from a secondary site, like we mentioned before.

In this case, in order to determine accountability, you must refer to the inducement rule. The inducement rule is a test created in a 2005 Supreme Court ruling. It states that a company or website can only be held accountable for distributing unlicensed content if it clearly encourages users to infringe a copyright.

Basically, the streaming sites are providing an avenue for accessing the illegal, copyrighted material.

They’re saying, “Hey, look, there’s this free, illegal content out here and we’ll show you. But, we didn’t put it there, so we’re not responsible for what you do with it.” They aren’t uploading the material themselves, so they are slightly off the hook.

However, if it’s deemed that the streaming sites are encouraging users to infringe on these copyrights, they can find themselves in legal trouble too. It’s a bit of a gray area.

The secondary sites are where the content actually exists, and they absolutely violate copyright law. There’s no gray area there.

So, the government can go after the secondary websites without a problem, and they can go after the streaming sites too if they can prove that they’re encouraging users to infringe on copyright laws.

Typically, it’s extremely difficult to find out who’s running the streaming sites. So, the sites get shut down, rather than the owners being arrested.

To sum this section up:

The user (you) is off the hook. The government is worried about the streaming sites and secondary sites, not you.
Even if they passed a law tomorrow stating that users accessing unlicensed streamed content were conducting an illegal activity and violating copyright laws, there would be far too many users out there to round up. They could never punish all of the users, so they wouldn’t bother. They focus on tackling the streaming and secondary sites instead.
The secondary sites are absolutely conducting illegal activity by uploading unlicensed streamed content.
The streaming sites, if the government can prove that they’re encouraging users to infringe on copyrights (gray area), are conducting an illegal activity as well.
The owners of these sites are almost never found, so the sites end up being taken down rather than anyone being physically arrested. Although if they did manage to figure out who the owners and operators were, they would attempt to arrest them.

There isn’t very much information available on streaming sites and the legality of it. It’s unprecedented material that will probably be cleared up more in the near future.

So, while these streaming sites are still operating, are they making any mula?

How These Sites Make Money: What Charitable Organizations These Are…Psyche

Yes, these streaming websites make money.

They make their revenue from two types of ads.

Website Ads
Video Ads streamed during the course of the film

The website ads are either already visible on the actual webpages, or they pop up in separate tabs when you click on certain features of the website that activate them.

Some streaming sites pause the movie you’re viewing throughout to display ads—and then resume playing your movie.

How Do Sites Earn Money

It’s incredible annoying, but, hey, you get to watch movies and television shows for free, so it’s tolerable.

There’s no legitimate market data out there on these streaming sites, but someone at Quora (a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users) has done the math and proposed some numbers.

Here’s the breakdown from Quora:

A) # of Visitors: Let’s say that the website attracts 10 million visitors annually
B) % of visitors who end up watch

How Does Sites Earn Money