Getting Free Advertising From Bandwidth Thiefs

You're absolutely right mcfox .... upon further review, the booth (brain) overturned my call on the field.

If I'm going to do anything, it do what I did with the "enticing" photo of Ashley Olsen and exploit to my site's benefit with advertising.

 

Hehe, if anyone is losing alot fo traffic because of hotlinking by teenagers on my space let me know, I'd be willing to pay for some prime advertising. =)

 

Along these lines, couldn't you - in htaccess - redirect the user to a .png file where the .png file shows a frame around the image they want to display and put your logo on there? Is this possible?

 

That's an awesome question - to wit I honestly don't know the answer, nor would I know how to safely implement.

Mitz - let me know what you're looking for ... I have lots more teenagers hotlinking my stuff on myspace - for the right price I'd be willing to change a photo for someone else's promotion campaign

 

I'm starting a project on elance to find out

 

That'd be awesome.

A few things you may need to know.

I do not have cPanel.

My host is ixwebhosting if that helps.

 

Its just a line in .htaccess right? I want it for my joke site too, I have sites stealing my images too. Its something I've been wondering for a long time. I don't want to stop it, as they count as links, but I'd like something out of it too.

 

We may have to recruit Nintendo or someone good with this sort of thing; besides, he'd like the opportunity to do something wacko to the little theives I'm thinking.

 

On one of our commerce site we spend $$$ to get professional pics of products and soon they were being used on other sites, so we decided to let them use it but with our site url / logo on it.

 

I usually take all my own product shots. I have 3-4 whitelights I shine on it. I've gotten good at photoshop and taking out the background. Some of them turn out pretty good. Takes a TON of time though.

How much do you spend/pic? I usually see it at about $25 per.

 

Hmmm, they were exploiting you, but aren't you in turn exploiting the celebrities? (by making money off of their fame) I'm not judging, just asking a question.

-RonMo

 

RonMo you're points are valid, but show me a celebrity who doesn't want more free publicity ...

 

I guess you must be right.. Their lawyers have not called you yet, right?

 

Wow - very cool and very clever.

 

Easiest approach is create an image the same size as the one being hot-linked (so it fits in the originating page if you are concerned about that). Resize that one down a bit, cut-n-paste into the new one, and then add your advertising around the sides. Save as new file name, and then tweek .htaccess so that if HTTP_REFERRER equal myspace (or ne your domain), serve up the altered image.

 

No, not for that ... just paternity suits

alek ... if you're familar with the htaccess process I'll need to get with you, it's not my forte; however, I've been doing the former with replacing the image manually.

 

I did the same thing to one of the blogs linking to my site and received over 1000 visitors in one month with advertising rather than the non relevant image shown, it works a treat!

 

Here's what I did with my .htaccess when someone was running an eBay auction hot-linking my BBQ Grill Pictures. By keying off of the HTTP_REFERER, you ONLY send those folks coming from that website to the "new" image ... in this case, instead of seeing a picture of a nice shiny grill, I sent 'em the image below. The eBay auction has rolled off - was frick'in hilareous to see.

RewriteEngine   on
RewriteCond     %{HTTP_REFERER}        http://cgi.ebay.com/.*
RewriteRule     .*\.jpg$               smallest_bbq_grill.jpg       [L]

Code (markup):

 

I love it. Good job!

 

I have the same issue with one of my sites, which has some downloadable free software. Any ideas on what you could do with that when other sites just provide the download link and don't send the traffic to my site?