Just a couple of days ago Empornium’s redesign was introduced and some site features (signup and search engine) have been made pay-only. Due to these changes some admins and contributors 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 several 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 that Targetpoint took complete control over Empornium, making more drastic changes and turning it into a paysite. That’s obviously a step too far.
Supporting BitTorrent sites is fine, buying them is OK with me but turning BitTorrent sites into paysites is wrong.
