I don't mind if people want to hot link to the thing and use the images on message boards and so forth, I really don't, but when a major corporate entity takes it upon themselves to populate their entire image search with hot links to *MY* stuff...yeah...that pisses me off. Especially when my traffic shoots up over 50% in three months as a result of it without any direct back tracking to my sites. I wouldn't care so much if I was actually making more money off of it via my ad banners, but I'm not. The only ones who are profiting off of it are Yahoo and other image search engines.
And the way I see it, it's only going to get worse. Less than 1% of the data archive is currently online, but that's still well over 3,000 files. And if only 1% causes a 50% jump in my already high web traffic...yeah...that's just gonna eat my server alive without any benefit to me at all.
I have thought about using it though as an opportunity to help spread my philosophies and such, basically by randomly replacing images with images of say goatse. On the one hand it teaches people the important lesson that you really can't control what you see online and, hopefully, wizens them up enough to get their idiot children off the grid. And on the other hand it'll sure make Yahoo and others think twice before they start ripping off my directory structures and serving my images up as if they're coming from them.
Just how bad is the problem getting for me? Watch this...
who cares
Go to Yahoo image search and search for "who cares" with no quotes. Oh, look at that, the very first link is from *MY* server. Want to see another? Try this:
bridget gay
Search for "bridget gay", again no quotes, oh look at that, again the FIRST link. *shakes head* This shit is gonna have to stop, even if I have to get nasty about it.
1 comment:
The Yahoo system is probably geared at the 95%+ of sites that aren't just bare directory listings... the site is designed so that if you click on the thumbnail (that they're hosting), it brings you to the page it came from... in other words, they're giving you a banner ad and delivering an audience who has searched for something where you came up prominently, i.e. that generally sought-for self-selected, targeted audience.
Wouldn't the simple and profitable solution be to put some of your banner ads right at the top of your directory listings? I think it's fairly easy to adjust most webservers to show up custom directory views... or just slap in a simple index.php that's effectively the same page, but with ads. Easy, and you get your money.
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