Syndication of mainstream sites. Hotlinking of images? Thoughts?
 

What are your thoughts on pulling feeds from mainstream sites and them not allowing you to keep the hotlink in place?

I don't have a real opinion on it, other than I would think having your site syndicated would be of enough value to allow for hotlinking.

Obviously in adult, we allow the hotlinking because we (program) gets the sale.

If I pull a feed to my mainstream site, I leave their aff codes in place, what would be the benefit in blocking my hotlinking at the import level?

I have noticed a few sites do this. So I am mostly curious as to why they might discourage it.

I've never seen this myself, but maybe they want to avoid questionable sites with questionable traffic altogether and just said fuck it?

Becauseyou are stealing their fucking content? :disgust

And some may see it this way. However, if I have a site whereas I send out to affiliates codes and I have images as well and you have a site with traffic, I would say syndicate via "no image download" as much as you like.

Unless you strip the codes, I could only see it helping.

But like I said, there may be good reasons and I would love to get opinions.

Thanks for yours and have a good weekend.

Does the feed provider specifically state that they disallow hotlinking of their feed content? It's possible it's a side effect of a generic hotlink config.

FWIW it's probably fairly easy to write a caching script that will fetch the image once from the original source, then re-serve it thereafter. Hotlinking means you're relying on third parties to ensure your page loads properly.

I remember reading about a judge ruling on hotlinking. I guess the linker found guilty of "linking" without permission and had to pay some odd sum of money.
maybe they can show this as an example to sue hotlinkers as well.

it's here is anyone is intrested in.

If I pull your feeds and leave your aff codes in place, would you allow me to hot link? To leave your image codes in place?

Mainstream has a different attitude altogether in regards to content. Much more stringent than adult. I used to work on biz dev deals and content integration with some large online publishers but everyone basically wants money. The companies I worked with all had readily available feeds but they were direct to consumer. If its another company that wants to pull the feeds and make money off of it, be it advertising revenue or whatever, they either want licensing fees or a cut of revenue. Rules are, you cannot use most companies feeds and profit from them.

They dont really care about the exposure per se.

Hope that I understood your question correctly.

If I was doing mainstream, no I wouldn't want allow that. In adult, I would say yes. Reason is the revenue volume. It doesn't compansate that much like in porn.

mainstream companies have that attetute, you're really right.:thumbsup If they want you to use their feeds, most probably they provide you an API for that.

in the end it's a fact that adult companies have the tolorence to bend stuff to make a few more sales but mainstream ones most of the time have hard time understanding how internet works. I would handle each company one by one and ask them to use their feed. If the case is too touchy to share with them, that means probably the company would say no to it already. otherwise you wouldn't have any problems...

this is a really valuable discussion btw, I appreciate everyone for this...