Thursday, April 12, 2007

MySpace Bans Photobucket (but can I get them to ban me?)

I can’t tell you what sort of bullshit this is, but I’m going to try:

MySpace has removed all hotlinked photos and slideshows (delivered in flash) hosted at Photobucket because they contain (sometimes) paid advertising. The advertising in question is a teaser campaign from Spiderman III. Here’s a bit of the story from PCWorld:

The block came in response to an ad-sponsored slideshow that Photobucket recently began running and that it encouraged MySpace users to post in their profiles, violating MySpace’s terms of service, the social networking site said in a statement.

Basically, only MySpace can junk up its pages with gratuitious advertising. MySpacers aren’t allowed to advertise other things. Well, they’re allowed to solicit sex and promote their albums and movies ... but they’re not allowed to hotlink to other advertisements.

Whatever.

My issue is that MySpace has been letting its users abuse my site for years. Yes, I’ve contacted them. I’ve contacted them. I’ve emailed them. I’ve even talked to folks I’ve met socially that work there. They don’t give a crap. It’s my problem their users don’t understand hotlinking is like making collect calls.

It turns out that it is possible to selectively block hotlinks from one domain. Halleluiah!

But now I discover that all I’d need to do is employ some .htaccess magic and have those thousands of hotlinked photos (yes, last month was 230,000 hotlink hits, the majority from MySpace according to the IP addresses logged) into some sort of ad that MySpace would feel threatened by. See, all this time I was thinking I had to put P()rn up there. Turns out that’s not what would catch their attention. Ads for, I dunno, something owned by some other media conglomerate might work.

Only problem is I can’t afford to host whatever image that might be (230,000 hits even at 10K each is kind of sizeable).

Wait a second ... I think I’m onto something here ...

I can sell the adspace! I can find someone who’d like their ad served up to 230,000 impressions in one month all over the web (though pretty much on MySpace).

The sale of that might cover the extra bandwidth I’d have to buy on my hosting plan.

So either I get my domain banned and don’t have to worry about bandwidth drains in the future ... or I make money with the ad impressions!

Here’s a bunch of articles:
Los Angeles Times
SFGate

POSTED BY Cybele AT 1:02 pm     Curious News

Comments
  1. Nice work and good luck with Myspace.  I went through circles and nightmares with them over page access to see what my teenage daughter was up to.  Arghhh…..its just a fancy pimp yourself blather for most.

    Comment by frazgo on 5/12/07 at 9:40 am

     

  2. The reason why myspace blocked photobucket, was some right about movie(spider), because photobucket created slideshow with frames from ‘Spider’ movie, and that was against myspace terms:0

    There are ways to prevent hotlinking using apache mod rewrite, so you could solve your problem preventing myspace domain to access your images. Or even better, create watermark for myspace domain, so there will be your logo or text, showing where from are images coming, and you would got more users(and more hotlinking:))

    Comment by Ciara >> Myspace Comments on 2/11/08 at 9:35 am

     

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During November it's all about me writing a novel. Sometimes it's about whalewatching. You know, and then there's other stuff.