Image Theft As Viral Strategy
Posted: December 14th, 2008 | Author: miconian | Filed under: Media And Advertising, Miconian At Large | Tags: Benjamin Button, trailers undone | 2 Comments »Over at Trailers Undone, I sometimes post screenshots that I take from movie trailers. I did this with The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, because the studio hadn’t yet released an English version of the trailer, and it was aggressively shutting down the Italian versions that were getting posted to YouTube.
Cut to some weeks later, and I’m looking through my referral log. The following sites are all using my Benjamin Button screenshot, along with my bandwidth, linking directly to the image on my server, yet not acknowledging in any other way that Trailers Undone even exists:
There was a third, IM, but after I called them out on it, they started linking to the image somewhere else (still not hosting it themselves). Come on, I thought. How big is this file, 3k?
I felt dissed. These other blogs, all of which are surely getting more traffic than mine, were using my bandwidth… to a tiny degree, but it felt as if someone had deliberately knocked against me in the street. It’s not a big deal, but why bother doing it?
Eventually, I realized that it’s not about the bandwidth at all. I had posted an image from a trailer that the studio was trying to suppress. By posting it, I was theoretically opening myself up to legal action, or something. So these other blogs link to my image and avoid the accusation that they themselves are involved in whatever shenanigans I’d gotten up to. Actually, that may not be the real reason, but it’s the best I could think of.
I considered a couple of retaliations:
a) Preventing the image from loading for requests that come with a referrer URL of the sites in question.
b) Renaming the image for my own use, and then posting another image with the original filename, so that it would suddenly show up on other blogs where the Benjamin Button screenshot had previously appeared. This message could be something angry or obscene, or an explanation of what had happened, or simply an ad for my own blog.
However, I decided not to do any of those things. Here’s why:
Each day, the majority of “pageviews” are actually views of my images on other blogs. But not all of them. Some users who see the image on other blogs actually notice on mouse-over that it belongs somewhere else, and then they decide to do a little exploring on Trailers Undone.
This situation hasn’t hurt the Google pagerank either. Here’s the first page of image searchs for “Benjamin Button”:
