Hello I have an interesting question. Growing up on the internet I've learned that it is unethical to hotlink and steal other people's bandwidth to display images on your site. But the advertisers I work with on CJ provide an "Image URL" in the Get Link page. Let's say I am promoting thousands of items from one advertiser. Are they going to get made if I hotlink all of those images? After all, they are providing them for use on CJ? I've been saving the pictures and then uploading them onto my own webserver but this is becoming very time consuming for me and is taking too much effort. Would it be bad if I started hotlinking instead? Also... since I'd rather not hotlink, does anybody know of a faster way for me to save the product images? Like some way to get many images in a batch...? I tried getting into the advertisers image directories but they dont allow indexes. =[ Any help is appreciated.
If you're pinching images from a big name CJ advertiser (e.g Newegg), I doubt they'll even notice... and if they do care about it, they will have already done something to prevent hotlinking. If the images you want to save have an incremental url (e.g domain.com/product100.jpg > product101.jpg etc) there's always Firefusk.
If the advertisers provide the link then they want you to use it to display their products on your web page. I did save some images to my web server but only because they were too large and I wanted to resize them. Otherwise I use any hotlink that is provided. I'm also affiliated to a company that has it's own scheme and they provide hot links to every product on their site. It's not uncommon.
What a guess! I'd just go ahead and hotlink 'em, they can afford the bandwidth - and you are advertising them after all. Only problem is if they ever change their image urls.
It's beneficial for them to have you hotlink, in case of product/image updates. Granted if you were producing ridiculous amounts of traffic and eating GB's upon GB's of bandwith it may be another story. If that were the case they would probably contact you before anything happened.
Their datafeeds have images that are hosted on their servers. They don't care as long as you are selling.
Bandwidth is cheap. The images are also in bitmap anyway, not a lot of B, and they get paid on impressions.