Show HN: User-owned image sharing | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: User-owned image sharing

surfer.io

80 pointsrgbrgb78 comments

Hey guys. I worked on this with a couple of friends. We were looking at the number of views posts on the front page of reddit get and trying to calculate ad revenue generated by this stuff. It seems crazy that top redditors can drive like 1M views and never see a penny--not to mention the fact that most image sharing sites basically claim ownership of your images. Even youtube gives users a cut of ad revenue.

This is an idea we had for making user-generated-content sites in a more user-friendly way.

Let us know what you think.

Edit: https://surfer.io/t1Uft

1. Most of the images posted to the front page of reddit are stolen.

2. Your site will be banned from most of reddit once it becomes clear that you're paying posters.

Not only that but they claim to be going after the Reddit/Imgur crowd but Reddit prefers and uses direct links to images; they rarely link to the full HTML page which is where this site would make any money.

Also Imgur has short links not only to the page itself but short links to the actual image. This site's image links look like this:

https://surfer-resizer.herokuapp.com/e12e_1394912757948.jpeg

Not exactly short.

To be fair, their full-HTML image pages seem to load incredibly quickly and are very plain.

And that second issue is barely worth mentioning, it's an incredibly easy fix.

It doesn't really matter how 'plain' the pages are since most people using sites like Reddit only use direct links to image hosts. The fact is you can't monetize directly linked images and its one of the biggest expenses for an image host.

Also, 'easy fixes' are irrelevant. Image hosting itself is 'easy' to do. Upload an image, store image, pull image. It's the details like direct linking and the issues like scaling to handle large traffic spikes that separate a good image host from the literally 100+ free image hosts that exist already and the hundreds that have died due to it becoming too costly to maintain.

Imgur is solving this by creating a "community" with comments and up/downvotes, so that user have incentives to open the full page and browse it (this is, by the way, one of the reasons why I don't like imgur at all). They also offer albums, which can obviously be seen only from the full page.

OP should look into adding things like that, some contents to encourage users to link/look at the whole page, and not only at the image.

Reddit Enhancement Suite supports most Imgur albums quite nicely without having to load the full site, or see their gross ads.

Sure, that's my point exactly. It's not interesting to comment on trivial omissions they made. The shortness of their links is not among the difficult problems that an image hosting service must solve.

the imgur html pages take several seconds to load for me. on both my mobile and my netbook they max out the CPU for many more second, leading to freezes and lag.

Do you take a cut? How do you make money?

If it takes off and becomes expensive to run we'll take a cut but right now we're just distributing all the adsense rev to users.

You could state that somewhere. I was assuming you take a cut and purposefully didn't mention how big it is.

This is something Surfer is going to have to state clearly during the sign-up process to avoid being villified by the Reddit and Imgur crowd.

I agree with you but I'm also super confused by that. Imgur does the same thing but their cut is 100%.

True. But when money and the mob mentality is involved, being upfront will protect you.

Most people feel worse with getting a salary cut than having low salary from start.

Will do, thanks for the feedback.

Their site states that your balance rolls over to the next month when it's < $20 and doesn't pay out until it reaches $20. Presumably they could make interest off of this "float" that's sitting in their account.

A good idea. You might want to include the names of the principles on the about page.

Good initiative but it lacks severely. First of all you will face all sorts of intellectual property problems. Then, you will have to deal with adoption. Imgur users are often linking to the HTML page of an image because Imgur is so clean and unobtrusive AND because it has extra features.

Why would people link to your HTML page instead of directly to the image? There are no comments, voting systems or even view counts, just the idea that someone is getting money might be disturbing to some.

Then, you have anonymity and ease of use. Unless your product is so good and unique, which it isn't right now, why would I register? The only thing is that I am getting some dollar cents if my content goes viral. I first have to register et cetera. Can I crop my image? Rotate it? Remove EXIF data?

I hope you manage, but I doubt it.

Thanks bro!

Let's try it out. Here is an excellent photo of two snails that I've titled "Slow Romance"

https://surfer.io/BkJ3L

I see what you did there. At least Tumblr gives credit to the actual artist.

http://redd.it/20fb5v http://bedabug.tumblr.com/post/78998774555/snails-kiss-on-ch...

Just curious. Is this an image you own? I remember seeing it on Reddit a few days ago.

Edit: the point was made.

and the point being that the service allows copyright infringement? Not being sarcastic, I'm genuinely trying to understand.

That's the point I took away from it yes. Person posts image that they do not own and profits from it. That could be problematic. Imgur, YouTube, etc.. Aren't responsible for user generated content. That's their out. Once a "user" wants to profit from content that isn't theirs, I don't see that flying.

Thanks for clarifying. Interesting point. I think that DMCA and the likes will protect this site just as it does for imgur, youtube etc. Youtube users can make profit from advertising as well. So I don't think the DMCA distinguishes between infringing copyright for profit or otherwise.

That being said, if this site gives much more opportunity to making profit from copyright infringement, then it's more likely to become a target for 'pirates' trying to make a quick buck out of other people's copyright work.

The site can do something similar to what youtube is doing, which is to forfeit any profits if a copyright complaint is made (and maybe even giving those profits to the original copyright holder). This could deter / nullify infringements at least in theory.

It is rather complex and difficult process to manage, so any site hosting user-generated content should consider those implications.

This is very beautiful.

My buddy built something similar on www.razzi.me (now defunct). They let users use their own adsense id and displayed their ads 50% of the time. They got banned from adsense and tried other providers but that didn't work out well either and they eventually shut down.

Any idea why they got banned from adsense?

Most likely because a user uploaded something that Google didn't like.

Google Adsense is pretty strict on the pages that you can display their ads on. If someone uploads a pornographic or offensive image to the site and theres a Google adsense ad on it, then Google will ban the entire site.

That was the reason. A user uploaded a photo Google didn't like, and since they were showing their own AdSense 50% of the time their own AdSense got tagged for the content as well.

If you want to be in control of your own images, videos, audio, whatever: set up your own instance of MediaCrush. It takes less than 10 minutes and you have complete control. You can go buy an Arch Linux droplet on DO and have your own media hosting solution done before you know it.

https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush

If you have slightly different needs, MediaGoblin is also a good choice.

http://mediagoblin.org/

MediaGoblin is also pretty cool, but it does indeed serve a different purpose. MediaGoblin also comes with a sort of lightweight social network (similar to Imgur), where as MediaCrush is meant to provide a platform to share with existing social networks. Also, MediaCrush uses a more permissive license (MIT).

Hm. Not sure I completely understand what's going on here. Is this supposed to be better than imgur?

I'm always a bit leery of something that immediately wants my credentials before making it perfectly clear what the product is. I actually got the most information from your terms page [1].

1 - https://surfer.io/terms.html

Yeah, it's basically our first stab at making an imgur like site with distributed ownership. We're aiming mostly at the reddit crowd right now but they seem to be VERY loyal to imgur so we'll see how that pans out.

Thanks for taking a look!

UI feedback on the image page: it's not immediately clear that the image itself is clickable (putting you into full-size view). Perhaps you could set `cursor: pointer` on that element.

Support for Surfer on Reddit Enhancement Suite will be crucial for this to do well on Reddit. Gfycat did this and it has paid off for them.

Thanks for the tip, we'll look into it.

That's a really good tip.

You get an internal server error if you submit the signup form on the front page without filling any fields.

You should probably let people just upload their pictures without signing up: offer money for those who do sign up. Currently, it's like that your service's main idea is to make money to the user rather than to let them upload images.

What's your plan to handle instances where users generate ad revenue from images they don't own?

So that's one of those gray areas that all user generated content sites have to deal with. For now I think we're (perhaps naively) thinking that we're protected the same way youtube, facebook, or imgur is from being liable for user content.

Look into "DMCA safe harbor registration" if you want protection.

You may want to do a little research into that. I know Youtube pays licensing fees for this sort of thing.

basically, you're soon going run into the same problem as Youtube, i.e. having to create your own ContentID system. This should be feasible through something like tineye.com, but for now, I would encourage you to not worry about it -- but do make sure you have a clear takedown policy in compliance with the DMCA.

The DMCA is the policy, and the first step to following that policy is registering an agent to receive infringement notices with the copyright office. That's an actual paper filing, mailed in, with a fee.

Here's the form: http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/agent.pdf

HN's, for example: http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/agents/n/news_ycomb.pdf

interesting, is there a way to track notices sent to the copyright office? is this a common way to file for infringing content? I thought the DMCA required you to contact the platform directly?

When you want to file an infringement notice pursuant to the DMCA, you determine where to send that notice by looking up the service provider's agent at the list on the copyright office website. That's what these filings are for, adding your company's agent to the list, so copyright holders know how to reach you. The notices are sent to the designated agent, not to the copyright office.

http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/list/a_agents.html

ah, i understand now. thanks!

Wow, thanks I had no idea. That's super useful.

It's a really interesting concept, if it takes off it would be nice to see how it affects the types of content people are posting (whether having the incentive of payment pushes people to generate/find more 'popular' content).

Right now traffic is low enough that we can manually verify each image [1].

[1]: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

Edit: I totally meant for this to be a reply to a different comment. Copying it there.

Is checking each image compatible with the DMCA safe harbor?

Not that I know of. I'm pretty sure that any kind of active curation ruins your safe harbor protections.

adsense or any ad server can block your account/domain because of a single inappropriate picture. How will you deal with that?

Would one option be to allow users to specify their Adense user ID on registration? That way, they'd be paid directly, and the page content would be their issue. I'm not sure what the Adsense ToS would have to say about this, mind you...

They'll likely do what imgur does and eventually move away from adsense.

AFAIK it is against Adsense ToS to display ads on image hosts, because of lack of content.

Right now traffic is low enough that we can manually verify each image [1].

[1]: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

DMCA and Ad compliance are core to the business model. They cannot be ignored by pointing your users to this link.

Manual verification like that could very well make you lose your safe harbor protections under the DMCA and Section 230.

This seems like a really cool idea! I'm not sure how well this would go over on reddit since they prefer direct-link images usually, but I love the idea. Good luck, I hope it takes off!

How are you sending revenue back to users? Do you wait until they reach a certain threshold before you transfer it to them? And do you use a particular service for doing the transfer? Does it eat a hefty piece of the transaction?

A good thing about imgur is that images load very quickly. I am not getting the same experience from your website.

http://imgur.com/99kuTjE took 3000ms to load, https://surfer.io/t1Uft took 7000ms.

The same image direct-linked from imgur took 300ms.

Yeah, the first time it loads at a certain size it makes a resized copy so that's probably the lag you're seeing. I'll update so it does the resizing on image upload and see how fast we can make it.

Thanks for trying it out!

I think you have a really good idea. I also agree that a lot of users would use an image sharing site if they know potentially they could make some money instead of none.

There are some really good points brought up in this thread, that I think you are going to have to battle against. Maybe not as severe as Popcorn just faced but these are issue.

Check out https://infotomb.com/ - these guys promote themselves - "Share files securely and anonymously." and "Your data your way". Might be similar value offering.

Awesome concept. It was about time someone made a system like this. As an avid redditor with quite a bit of useless reddit-karma, I'll give your site a try. If you were selling company shares, I'd buy some right away :) Good luck!

Concept is interesting. I'm a photographer... is this thing worth it? How many views do I need to generate 1 US Dollar? BUT you site is too slow. I will not predict a bright future with this speed. It takes too long.

So, $/views isn't a simple calculation because it depends on the quality of traffic. Basically I just look at my adsense account every day and divvy that between users.

Approximately for 1-2K views you can make out 1$!

Why do you require registering to upload? You want it to be as quick to get started with as other services and on top of that you get to collect the ad revenue until they decide it's worthwhile doing so.

This is a great idea. The domain name is not the best, but the intent is. Best of luck to you, and I hope to be able to share photos on it one day, if I ever think I can make money off of one.

How does the payout of ad revenue work legally? Normally you can't just write checks to people without either employing them or requiring them to have a company.

Cool idea! I really like the site design. Coincidentally enough, the color scheme and flat design style looks almost exactly like something I'm working on haha

Seems nice, but it seems to ignore the exif rotation/orientation data... is that something that should be handled when the image is uploaded?

Hmm, that may be a problem with the image-resize server we're using [1]. We'll take a look ASAP. Sorry about that.

[1]: https://github.com/jimmynicol/image-resizer

Reply on news.ycombinator.com