Whenever I use websites such as Imgur I generally only want the image source file hosted so that I can embed it somewhere else. This leads me to a state of annoyance with the ads and comments around my images. I get past this by right clicking > view image to get the source link, then using that and never the link Imgur provides.
This got me thinking, what about an image hosting website that after upload redirected you directly to the source image, rather then bothering with wrapper pages. That's something I would use, so I made it.
The main reason websites don't already do this is because hosting the source image isn't profitable, in fact websites lose money by doing this because it costs the same bandwidth and diskspace but they are unable to put ads along side their images. To fix this I have implement a more direct form of payment in which users can send bitcoin to buy a quota of wrapper free images.
The website is src-img.com
Some feedback on this idea would be great. I don't really expect it to take off so it's on my existing VPS which could be getting a little bogged down with all the stuff I load on to it. If people like this I will make a dedicated VPS for it and move it there. If not then it will serve well for my own personal use, moving me away from Imgur.
One thing that discourages this business model is the current fees market. I spent more on fees then buying my quota when I was testing its ability to receive payments, and I still need to sweep the funds off it again. Any suggestions on how to counter this would be welcome, people using it can probably get away with a low fee as I can use child pays for parent when sweeping the address. It does not require confirmations to use, only mempool, since needed confirmations to upload an image sounds silly. I have thought of using altcoins (such as Litecoin) and may implement this latter.
Topic: Image source hosting, unwrapped (Read 167 times)
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