Adventures in Hotlinking: Part 4

Hotlinking according to altlab is:

Not a day goes by without me checking to see if someone is hotlinking to files owned by Short Consulting clients or myself. I’d like to share some of the cases of hotlinking I’ve had to deal with in the past year.

Adventures in Hotlinking will be an ongoing series of articles about my experiences in dealing with bandwidth theft.

Nemo is #1 image on Short Family Web Site

A long time ago my mom forwarded me this image. I laughed and decided to host it on my family’s site for all to see.

Other people seemed to laugh at it too. In December 2004, the Short Family Web Site had 1,111 hits from people searching for Nemo on image search sites. A query on Google image search has that image from the Short Family Web Site on the first page. Great!

Then the hotlinkers came. In a month I started feeling the pain of the hotlinkers as they sucked down hundreds of megabytes of bandwidth just by hotlinking one popular image. I put a few sites on notice by selectively blocking their ability to hotlink the image. That seemed to help.

I saw this as an opportunity to get some free advertising. I added a quick tag line to the image explaining that it was hosted at shortfamilyonline.com and re-opened hotlinking to that image by anyone. There has been a slight increase in traffic overall since doing that. This is a rare case of benefitting from hotlinking.