It has been and shall always be about money, it's to push/nudge/coerce folks into purchasing the PREMIUM accounts.

Does this make it bad, no not really, these folks are not creating a web site to *not* make money at it so they have come up with a so-called clever way of making some coin, by conveying the sense that everyone has to queue up in order to get the file/files they want and offering an option for the impatient people out ther 😉

I do not mind waiting a few seconds. Some Captchas, on the other hand... are evil.

waiting a few seconds is ok, being only allowed to download one file per day is evil (and captchas are, too 😀)

at least it's not fkin' lines.

but the stupidest ones i've seen do a countdown to an EXTERNAL LINK. Download.com.......

It helps them to prioritize their bandwith for paying users. They hope that by making you wait 30,45,60 seconds or whatever that you'll get discouraged and abort the download or sign up as a paying member to get the files you want faster.

I've also seen ones that make you wait a set amount of time between downloads, too. You can't queue up a bunch of files and download them one after the other and hog all the bandwith as a free user. You have to wait anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours before you can download again. They log your IP address and you get locked out from downloading again until their timer counts down.

I've often figured that the wait ..nn.. seconds to download can easily save these sites tons of bandwidth. It is very easy to start downloading a file and then never think about said file ever again. So if, in such circumstances, the sites can stop even a small percentage from ever downloading at all, it can be worth it for them.

P.S. Check out the SkipScreen addon for FireFox.

As already mentioned the waits encourage users to sign up for the premium services. Additionally they cause folks to stare at ads for longer than they would otherwise (presuming they aren't using ad blockers, yeah Ad Muncher) increasing the likelihood that ads get clicked. The extra "wait" page frequently also provides an opportunity to show multiple ads (i.e. one on the wait page, one on the DL page).

Hmmm...I never thought of the Ads perspective. That part makes sense too - most Ads are on the page where the download link is about to appear too. Hmmm...

And yes, I feel that they get some relief from free downloaders one after another, if they impose some download limit.

But it is disheartening and evil to see a single download limit per day (or per few hours), if not paying!

And as leileilol said, it's is absolutely stupidly terrible to wait for few minutes, only to see the link to another download site where the actual file is situated! ROTFL!! 😁

No matter how much I want to justify the companies that impose a waiting sequence, AND provide options to "upgrade" to premium accounts with so many "handicaps lifted" if paying, there's this nagging feeling that these companies have found out a new way of making money.Lots of money. I still can't over my head Rapidshare labelling themselves as "The Anti-Waiting Company"! 🤣

For now, I think those sites that do NOT offer any subscriptions, but do impose the time limit to prevent bandwidth clogging, are the most genuine, so far. Maybe.

Malik wrote:

No matter how much I want to justify the companies that impose a waiting sequence, AND provide options to "upgrade" to premium accounts with so many "handicaps lifted" if paying, there's this nagging feeling that these companies have found out a new way of making money.Lots of money. I still can't over my head Rapidshare labelling themselves as "The Anti-Waiting Company"! 🤣

For what it's worth, the last couple of times I've downloaded from Rapidshare, there hasn't been any wait time, either before the download starts, or between downloads. Also, the download was pretty fast, probably 1.5MB/s.

Megaupload is another site that's pretty good for free users. If you register for a free account (they don't even verify the email address you give), it cuts the wait time from 45 seconds to 25 seconds. There's no wait time between downloads and I've downloaded between 2-4GB from them before being told I'd reached my limit and being made to wait a couple hours. You can also use a download manager to resume downloads, although you can't use download accelerators. Even so, I've gotten speeds up to 2MB/s at times. It seems like the luck of the draw though. Other times I might get 400K/s download speed.

Speaking of resuming transfers, that's another scam. Some of the sites claim that when you pay for an account, your download gets routed through more advanced servers capable of resuming a broken transfer. Resuming a transfer is nothing special and virtually any site should be able to do it.