Ain’t It Uncool
Son of a…
I check my stats after leaving them alone for 3-4 days, and I get a shock. About 30,000 more hits than could be expected. Roughly 12,000 more unique-IP visitors than normal. A one-day high on Thursday of 7500 visitors, 5500 on Friday, 4000 on Wednesday, when the recent average has been hanging around 1800. Huge spike in visitors.
At first, I think this may be because I got a link in from somewhere, some big-traffic site saw mine, put a link out, and thousands of people come to check out what I’ve been saying. But when I check my referrers and page stats, there’s not a single blip. Nothing to account for it all. And then I figure it out. I check the cellar of my referral list, and there they are. A massive hotlinking event.
What is a hotlink, you ask?
A hotlink is when one web site hijacks an image from another web site. You see an image on web site “A,” you think it exists there. Usually it does. But with hotlinking, the image is really from web site “B,” a different site. The owner of web site A simply told your browser to go to site B, get the image, and display it as part of web site A. Web site B hosts the image, owns it, pays for it–but web site A, the thief, gets the props for displaying it, and no one ever hears of the site that actually has the image. It’s like someone taking credit for something you did. You did the work, you paid the price, but someone else reaps the benefit and suppresses your name.
Allow me to demonstrate. Look at the “Links” button at right. The image appears here on my site, blogd.com, right? Ha! Fooled you! It’s not on blogd.com at all! It’s on one of my other sites (www.teach-japan.com, a site forever under construction). If you looked at the coding for this blog page, you’d see that the image address is really at the other site. But by a simple web page command, I was able to integrate the image into this web page, so it seamlessly appears to be located here. My other site gets no credit, no one knows it came from there.
Well, what’s wrong with that, you ask? Plenty. You see, hosting a web site costs money. You pay for disk space. You also pay for “traffic,” also called “bandwidth,” meaning that every time you visit my site and see the images, they are being sent (“downloaded”) to your computer. If the image is 100 KB in size, then I get docked 100 KB in traffic by the people who host my site. Every month, I pay that web host a fee for disk space and traffic.
When someone hotlinks to one of my images, it appears on their web site, but I’m paying for the storage and transport of that image. It’s as if someone not only steals a painting from your house, but they also charge you for the gas used by the getaway car and the fees for the storage locker to keep the stuff they stole from you. It’s more than that, since the image is repeatedly stolen by each and every visitor to their web site. If they hotlink to an image 100 KB in size, and 1000 people visit their page, then I get docked for 100 Megabytes of traffic fees. Now, I pay a flat fee for a lot of traffic, but still, it’s my traffic.
Hotlinking is considered even more of a no-no because the hotlinker appears to be taking credit for the image, and the person who is paying for it remains uncredited, not getting so much as a link-through. If they had made the image into a link and I actually got thousands of new visitors to my site, that’d be OK, because I want new visitors. But they didn’t–they hotlinked without credit, so they got the goods, and I got shafted.
Usually, when people hotlink from me, it’s people at places like Xanga or MySpace (where people set up “free” sites), or people on discussion forums who want to show images but aren’t allowed to upload them to the forum space. Usually I find out when an image gets downloaded from my site hundred of times. I find out where it’s going, then I either allow it, or I swap out the image.
But this time, it was a commercial site, one that sells advertising. A movie rumor site called “Ain’t It Cool.” And they hit me for 30,000 image transfers, which cost me about 1.5 GB in traffic before I caught it.
Well, I showed them. One of the dangers of hotlinking is that they don’t control the image! I do! So I changed it. Instead of the image they wanted to have on their site, I replaced it with a plain-text image ad for my site! The image is this:
The beauty of it is, they probably won’t even see it until someone points it out to them. Their own browsers already have the original image in the browser cache, and so the new image only shows up when new people come to visit. See if you can spot it, the page is located here. As long as it’s up, I get free advertising on a hot web site! Whee!
UPDATE: They yanked the image. Ungrateful wankers. They stole 1.5 GB of traffic from me, then erased my ad within just a few days. I’d like to say, “that’ll teach ’em,” but from the comments on this post, I gather these guys are simply contemptible lowlifes, and they’ll keep on doing it. But not to me, if I can help it. I’ll have to be more vigilant about watching the stats for hotlinkers.
Alas, I come too late. The mass of the hotlinking wave is past, 12,000 people saw the original image, and I might only catch a few thousand (and probably few of them will actually come and see my site). But still, it’s fun to punk someone who’s filching from me.
As one who’s been hit by that too, I suggest you also shoot aintitcool an email. They’re not bad folks, truth be told.
They may have stuff that you like to read, but if they have massive amounts of visitors and yet they hotlink to small sites and steal their bandwidth like that–sorry, but that’s petty. Way uncool. They should know better.
As for contacting them, it’s too late. The wave is mostly over, and the chances that they’ll do it again to my site in particular is slim to none. Better to try to get back just a sliver of what they took from me. Tell your friends! 😀
The adv is not being compressed well as a jpg (the black to white is not clean). Png files do better with this kind of graphic. One can save a png file with Windows Paint.
That’s intentional. The original file was a JPG, so the swapped file must also be a JPG, else the image hotlink would fail. I compressed it to 0% quality/100% compression to save space. The image is readable, and that’s good enough.
Since it’s in the middle of a relatively long editorial article, I suspect that it was the *author* of the article that linked to you, and not Ain’t It Cool themselves.
Fire off an email anyway. Sure, it probably will mean they’ll fix the link, but if they’re done using it it won’t matter, and it might shake their cage enough to get them to double-check submissions in the future.
If it’s AIC doing it themselves, well, then they’re jerks.
Paul
Seattle, WA
“They may have stuff that you like to read, but if they have massive amounts of visitors and yet they hotlink to small sites and steal their bandwidth like that–sorry, but that’s petty. Way uncool. They should know better.”
As a regular reader of both your site and Ain’t It Cool…yeah, they’re morons. They have egos the size of Texas and really could care less who they tick off unless it is someone in Hollywood who could advance their careers. I can believe they are big enough asses to hotlink another blog like this though…that’s just beyond wrong, but I believe it.
I had someone do this to me recently with pictures of an XBox and it showed up in a lot of Ebay auctions. Let’s just say my picture wasn’t as kind as yours.
Ag, Harry Knowles and his Aint-it-Cool-News bods are thieving gits when it comes to images.
I used to read AICN but then I discovered other, more ethical movie sites (can I mention Dark Horizons ??). Harry’s purile editorial and movie-studio-freebie biased editorial degenerates to drivel all too quickly.
Then they have the hubris to constantly rape-and-pillage other sites bandwidth with their image linking. Considering that Harry gets an immense number of hits (and payouts from Hollywood) you’d expect him and AICN to at least have the good grace to suck down the images to their own server.
Although, that would also get them introuble with Hollywood too no doubt when someone snaps a picture on a set of a yet-to-be-released movie and posts it on the big WWW. With image linking, at least he’s reporting on the report – a bit like the papers reported on the Danish cartoon.
Check the article – it’s full of other peoples images. Other peoples money.
“…a site forever under construction,” Luis?
That’s so Web 1.0. Sites aren’t “under construction” anymore, they’re “in (perpetual) beta”! 😉
Very interesting, and well done on your reprisal!
Saw this on j-walk today, don’t know if it will help, but thought I would pass it along anyway. Good luck!
“How do you deal with image hot-linking?
Until recently, I just ignored it. But not too long ago I added some code to my .htaccess file that prevents other site from displaying my images. I made exceptions for a few online RSS readers and Whole Wheat Radio. For details, do a Web search for htaccess image hotlinking.”
http://j-walkblog.com/
Sorry, but the post is not very helpful. He could have taken the five seconds to copy-and-paste the .htaccess code, or put a link to the site where he got the data from. I’ve done the search and have never seen a site that explains how to do a universal hotlink exclusion while also providing specific exceptions. I already have excluded Xanga and MySpace using .htaccess, but would be wary about a universal exclusion and its possible unknown consequences.
There is a hotlink protection option on most web sites provided by CPanel, but when I do that, most of my viewers can’t see the images directly on my own site.