stated that funds supported only the tracker, and offered time-limited benefits to donors such as no advertisements and "VIP" status. After that, the link was removed from the home page, and the donations page only recommended donating "to your local pro-piracy group" for a time, after which it redirected to the site's main page. Billboard claimed that the site in 2009 "appeals for donations to keep its service running". In 2006, Petter Nilsson, a candidate on the Swedish political reality show Toppkandidaterna (The Top Candidates), donated 35,000 Swedish kronor (US$4,925.83) to The Pirate Bay, which they used to buy new servers. In 2007, the site ran a fund intended to buy Sealand, a platform with debated micronation status. In 2009, the convicted principals of TPB requested that users stop trying to donate money for their fines, because they refused to pay them. In 2013, The Pirate Bay published its Bitcoin address on the site front page for donations, as well as Litecoin. Merchandising The site links to an online store selling site-related merchandise, first noted in 2006 in Svenska Dagbladet. Advertising Since 2006, the website has received financing through advertisements on result pages. According to speculations by Svenska Dagbladet, the advertisements generate about 600,000 kronor ($84,000) per month. In an investigation in 2006, the police concluded that The Pirate Bay brings in 1.2 million kronor ($169,000) per year from advertisements. The prosecution estimated in the 2009 trial from emails and screenshots that the advertisements pay over 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) a year, but the indictment used the estimate from the police investigation. The lawyers of the site's administrators counted the 2006 revenue closer to 725,000 kronor ($102,000). The verdict of the first trial, however, quoted the estimate from the preliminary investigation. , IFPI claims that the website is extremely profitable, and that The Pirate Bay is more engaged in making profit than supporting people's rights. The website has insisted that these allegations are not true, stating, "It's not free to operate a Web Site on this scale", and, "If we were making lots of money I, Svartholm, wouldn't be working late at the office tonight, I'd be sitting on a beach somewhere, working on my tan." In response to claims of annual revenue exceeding $3 million made by the IFPI, the site's spokesman Peter Sunde argues that the website's high bandwidth, power, and hardware costs eliminate the potential for