Shortly after Reddit user reborndead posted a link to an image on Web comic site Explosm.net last week, a funny thing happened.
The image suddenly changed.
The artist, Rob DenBlyker had uploaded a modified version of the same comic — but now with a note attached to the bottom:
It was a plea for Reddit users to link directly to sites that publish original content.
“We’re not charging money for these comics, what we really thrive on is that tiny increase in readership a Reddit plug provides,” DenBlyker wrote.
But just a day before, a new image hosting site launched that might fix that problem entirely.
The site is called Ehost, and it promise to share images ethically.
“We all know that people [have] been ripping shit and posting it onto Reddit without a source for years,” the site’s creator who goes by readcommentbackwards, wrote on Reddit. “I just wanted to change that and give the authors credit where it’s due, automatically.”
He was referencing Imgur, the most popular image hosting site among Reddit users, which does not give credit to content creators. Links to Imgur are so common that many joke Reddit is basically a front end for the image hosting site (Imgur actually sees more traffic than Reddit itself, according to Alexa.com)
The problem is this: Content creators see none of that Imgur traffic — and therefore get none of the ad revenue.
Ehost tries to take a more financially equitable approach to hosting. If a hosted image receives 10,000 views or more, the service automatically searches for the source using the TinEye service. Once a source is found, Ehost gives credit to the artist in the form of a link on the image page.
Meanwhile, Ehost promises to pay back its largest referrers 10 percent of the revenue they create (“Yes, we will be writing a check to Reddit monthly,” readcommentbackward notes).
The site also seeks to reward people who create original content. Through a sponsorship program, users can essentially own a portion of Ehost for $10 a month, then take a portion of the advertising revenue.
“I realized that Reddit is this great source of community creativity,” readcommentbackwards told the Daily Dot. “Yet there was no way for those creative folks to reap some rewards.”
None of that actually deals with DenBlyker’s original problem: People often link directly to an image, and not the web page itself.
But readcommentbackwards told the Daily Dot he’s working on a solution to that problem as well.
He’s planning a system where users can ask Ehost to redirect to the source page. Ehost will host the image only if the original site goes down due to traffic overload.
Ehost officially announced itself to Reddit last Friday. Within a day, it had seen 600,000 visits. The site’s servers are pushing out about 41 gigabytes of data a day.
That’s not bad for a project that’s only a week old.
Still, some users are already complaining. The sponsorship program isn’t generating much money, they say.
“It was never our intent for people to get rich,” readcommentbackward told the Daily Dot. ”But I do think that as the site gets more and more real traction, we will see better return for those users.”
He added: “It’s a work in progress.”
Photo by adamjackson1984
