What Happened to 66Stage.com?

66Stage.com is a well-known video sharing website that essentially embedded movies hosted on servers such as; Youku.com, Tudou.com, Veoh.com, Videos.Yahoo.com, Video.Google.com, and MegaVideo.com; just to name a few. It was a very popular site; most likely due to the fact that it was a source to watch movies that had only recently premiered in theatres.

However, something happened to 66Stage.com some time last week; visitors no longer received a homepage that listed all the latest movies that had been posted on the site… they were redirected to www.themoviedownloads.com, which has a cheery young person introducing TheMovieDownloads as the Number 1 Movie Downloads website in the world. Disappointing? definitely.

I find its not uncommon for someone to:
STEP 1: Build a website and generate lots of traffic
STEP 2: Once it has reached significant traffic levels, sell the domain name / website to someone where it can be URL forwarded to another website to increase traffic to that website and thus revenue by taking advantage of search engine results, bookmarks to the site, etc. I believe that this is what could have possible happened to 66Stage.com. After you have all the backlinks, bookmarks and social buzz about the site, all you have to do is sit back and watch your traffic fly through the roof.

66Stage.com background:

Website Traffic (compete.com):
66Stage.com received approximately 150k visitors per month

Website Age (archive.org):
66Stage.com has only been indexed as far as October 2007
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://66stage.com

Domain Name Registration (domainsatcost.ca):
The domain name doesnt actually expire until September later this year, but was recently updated on February 6 2009
http://domainsatcost.ca/DomainSearch.aspx?q=66stage&t=CA,COM,NET,ORG,BIZ,INFO,US,NAME

Call it part domain name monetization or simply business. The bottom line is that nothing is going to be free forever, BUT on the web, you can be assured that there will always be another website doing the same thing or will be if one goes down.

Tell me what you think about my assumption in a comment below.

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