That's like not minding that your fat ugly annoying neighbour is being mugged. Wrong is wrong.

Do you think there's any other way to run the site, at least in 2011?

There's no other reasonable way they could make enough money to cover the expenses. The audience for these sites is, by design, children/teens with no access to money and adults who are there explicitly to avoid spending money. By the nature of the content they host, they're not going to get any first tier advertisers, so they have to make up for it in volume.

Yes, it's designed to host illegal pirated content. I know there are plenty of legitimate uses for it, but it doesn't change that it's still a shitty site.

I'm not saying that nothing should be done about this Universal thing. I actually enjoy seeing the music industry taken down a few pegs.

If you use jDownloader, they differences between those sites become irrelevant.

Odd, I can't remember seeing any ads on megavideo. I haven't been there in a while but at that point it had a solid ux until it cut you off at 70 minutes to make you wait or pay.