We can get a hint about how much of the advertising went to the founders, by comparing it with an other high alexa ranked site: Wikipedia. Their budget is public.
At the time when Peter Sunde operated it, Wikipedia had about about 3 times the traffic of TBP. Wikipedia also had about 10 times higher of the operational budget (not counting Salaries and wages). We get this by looking at the TPB advertising money as reported by the police, and comparing it to the WP budget.
One can then either assume that Wikipedia administrators are swimming in money and have all bought small island in the Caribbeans, or that running a services on that scale is actually quite expensive.
> One can then either assume that Wikipedia administrators are swimming in money and have all bought small island in the Caribbeans, or that running a services on that scale is actually quite expensive.
Running services on the WMF may be quite expensive but that tells us little about TPB - the WMF is not really comparable. They're running hundreds of projects, not just the English Wikipedia; their staff are living in one of the most expensive places in the world, San Francisco; they're developing & supporting an infrastructure much more complicated than 'upload a torrent file and a textual description box', due to editing pages by all sorts of users with different privilege levels and rich media and exploiting HTML5 and working with new MediaWiki extensions like Semantic and of course the truly enormous size of Commons' media database of millions of photos and images and videos; they work under many more legal pressures than TPB (which takes joy at thumbing their nose at any legal issues); coordinate dozens of chapter organizations worldwide (some with significant amounts of revenue like the de chapter); and do other things like the floating Wikimania conference or the DVD encylopedias aimed at Africa or surveys or editor-retention projects or third-world article writing contests etc.
What TPB does is impressive in its own way, but simply is not on the same scale of complexity or variety.
At that time, Semantic was developed and funded by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Commons was just a year old and was of 1/16 of todays size. I am also not sure how many chapter organizations they had, or if the work towards any DVD encylopedias was in the works then.
I also intentionally excluded travel for the above calculations.
An other telling part can be seen in the Wikimeda fundation 2006 budget under the heading of "Internet hosting". To my understanding, that number is exclusive bandwidth costs.
At the time when Peter Sunde operated it, Wikipedia had about about 3 times the traffic of TBP. Wikipedia also had about 10 times higher of the operational budget (not counting Salaries and wages). We get this by looking at the TPB advertising money as reported by the police, and comparing it to the WP budget.
One can then either assume that Wikipedia administrators are swimming in money and have all bought small island in the Caribbeans, or that running a services on that scale is actually quite expensive.
Link to 2006-2007 WP budget: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/49/Wikim... Link to TPB budget for 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pirate_bay#Advertising