There are other ways to monetize, some significantly more profitable than adsense, but yes media buys of shady traffic will most likely cause shady results
What are some of the other ways? (honestly asking).
Premium features and such are a possibility, but I don't really see the value for people to pay for this beyond maybe a tiny community, and they would surely need some premium features in return (like maybe private torrents or something).
Perahps an API, for stats maybe, or something else not sure. Affiliate of VPN or Hosting, or if you know how to code, roll your own VPN service and use that as a traffic source. The hardest thing, at least in my opinion to get on the internet is traffic. That generally only comes with great products, or great branding.
I buy a decent amount of stuff online. I've even seen ads for something and bought it the first time I saw it.
But I would never, ever, buy anything after clicking an ad on a torrent site, even one I knew to be 100% legal and above board. Hell you'd be hard to get me to even click one of the ads in the first place let alone just open a new tab and search for whatever the product was.
The risks are everything from spam to scam to fraud to full-blown identity theft if you click the wrong ad on the wrong site, and all of that can be obviated by just searching for the thing in a new tab 99% of the time. The juice (getting the site owner a fractional percentage of the sale at best, or a fraction of a penny for a click) ain't worth the squeeze IMO.
