That is amazing. But last week I hit 60,000 page views, and one $25 sale. That is a new record in terms of popularity and dismal monetary conversion. As usual, a lot of these views are from hotlinks where one of my images is used as background material for a teenage blog. The web is the new teenage angst hangout. And angst needs an appropriate background. Enter Dave Beckerman - angst backgrounds incorporated. Okay, not incorporated - but dark and mysterious enough to put your stories about how so-and-so didn't look at you right - on.
In the old days - these were posters that you stuck up on your wall and drove your parents nuts with. Now those posters are in cyberworld. And your parents don't even have the password - do they?
Now you can stick anything you can find up - and it don't cost a dime. What I should do is hold a parasitic contest. It will be based on bandwidth usage and one of the categories will be "Best Use of a Hotlinked Photograph." Another category will be worst use of same.
Well, there you go boys and girls: 60,000 page views and one $25 print sale. You do the math.
5 comments:
I have been trying to determine the pattern in the images from my site that are used on myspace, xanga, livejournal etc. Problem is that they take eveything from photos of signs, the photos of flowers or animals; photos of landmarks to photos of movie posters. I'm just glad that I don't pay per-Kb for bandwidth :-)
Dave
You could use Macromedia Flash to display your images; this doesn't allow the ol' 'right click save as routine'.
Have a look at this guys site; www.lifeshots.co.uk and try to download an image.
It may be a longwinded process to change all your images to Flash, but it might deter the casual pirate from stealing your work.
Or have a look at this site:-
http://www.wildlifephoto.net/articles/webdesign/imageprotection.html
Allan,
Most of the solutions for this I've had a look at - at one time or another. Changing to flash is out of the question for a number of reasons: too much trouble given the way I generate things; not everyone has it; and most of the other methods can be broken fairly easily.
I don't mind people "stealing" the images - what I find annoying is that people will take just about anything they can find if it is free - but if you charge $5 they'll just look elsewhere.
I could make it more difficult for the casual teenager by enabling a right-click javascript; but let 'em have it; and they haven't hit the point at which they've gone over my transfer rate (i.e. it doesn't cost me anything extra). If it does - then one of the best solutions I've found is to periodically change the image directory. Then everyone's links are busted and it takes them about two months before they catch on and the next wave starts up.
"A copyright notice inside each image is probably a good idea...even though most people will ignore it."
I thought that was sort of a good idea and used to do it - but bandwidth usage went up actually - and I began to realize that saying, copyright Dave Beckerman, or copyright DaveBeckerman.com was just telling the teens where to get the stuff. Hey - free stuff here!
Anything that you do can be circumvented, either by looking in your cache - or printscrn, or some other thing I haven't thought of. I just find the ratio of stolen to purchased images an amazing thing. Maybe "amazing" is the wrong word after all these years - but *important* might be a better word.
iTunes, for example - if it had to sell songs for $5 a song wouldn't work. .99 works. I think if you could sell pictueres for .99 you could sell alot of them.
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