Adult business advice / general question

bouncey · 2010-06-09, 09:42 PM

Hey Everyone, new to the forum here, I've posted this on another forum but this one seems a more sensible place to ask a business question. My appologies for the wall of text and tl;dr factor, it's too complex an issue to cover in a couple of lines.

We have a somewhat unique and bizarre problem that maybe you can help me with. Lets start by saying that I run a fairly serious internet tech company (no, we're not selling anything) and we're not really interested in the adult market at all (but we're certainly not naive [apparently forums hate the doube-dotted 'i']). We have a lot of random side projects, and some of them develop into possible marketable ideas, some are just fun, and some just wander off and die in the corner. OK! So brief background done, onto the point why I'm on some forums.

One of our side projects was a semi-intelligent (very polite) AI bot which half-decided to be a web crawler (we specialise in experimental high performance computing and massive datasets) which trundled off and indexed parts of the web without much oversight. We obviously didn't really think this through, as a massive percentage of the internet is porn. To cut a long story short, it basically downloaded some 90million large images and indexed them, some 10% were adult/porn. We've since stopped it.

Of these 10%, about 3.5 million are from known/trusted/verifiable websites (ie: not untagged images on Imgur or other possible dodgy sources, had proper adult tags) and most of them are grouped into sets / galleries.

I suppose you could consider this a cached index of free galleries. Not being a adult company and not being bastards (we're obviously not going to resell this, we're not thieves) we've not really done anything at all with it. We made a very quick TGP style gallery, but quite frankly the number of images is pretty staggering, along with a little play (smartphone) mobile site.

Before you all shout about how we're heathenous people no better than the tube* site, the example gallery is completely non-profit (no ads or banners at all), we're paying personally for the bandwidth out of pocket, and each sample gallery on the site has a direct non-affiliated link back to where it came from, so we're giving back to the industry for free at the moment, and hopefully they see that (we've had no complaints). We've generated about 106,000 clicks off our site to the original sources since launch a few months ago, this sounds pretty good from what I've seen of the industry stats.

We completely ignored the project since setting it up and with no marketing what so ever it gets about a million page views a quarter (300kish a month), which translates into about 2mbit of bandwidth (nothing to our current network, really). The mobile site gets a couple of hundred hits, effectively zero from a business perspective.

So, basically, we have some project that could be interesting, we have no idea what the industry thinks about it (why we're asking here) - if there's a general outcry we'll probably just kill it as we don't need the hassle.

It's almost certainly the largest private collection of adult images in clean categorisations on the internet from what we can see, it totals about 280GB of raw images.

In fact, we have so much porn we can do completely ridiculous stuff like this (not that you need it here, but WARNING, PORN, NSFW etc.):

http://i.imgur.com/8LKRO.jpg

These are massively low res cutups, the originals are about 80mb and are some 10000px wide, yes each of those little squares is a different porn image.

Some stats for the nerdy / webmaster people on here:

about 3.5 million categorised images, in about 35 categories
if you looked at each image as your day job (one image every 5 seconds, 9-5, working week) it would take you 2.4 years to see each one
they're all progressive 80% quality JPEGs, with thumbnails, web optimised
total size is about 280GB
we have the following reference data in an index: images, image size, R/G/B index, overall gallery quality, gallery category, gallery source domain and URL, and some other stuff in a RDBMS schema
absolutely none, 0%, of the images are from members areas (only free areas are crawled, for obvious reasons), so providing you're not evil it should be usable
The test domain/gallery site has 160k fully Google indexed URLs, and has Google sitelinks
Approximately 300,000 galleries, about 11-12 images per gallery
The full database dumped as raw SQL is about 1GB uncompressed

So basically, any ideas what to do with this? I assume it has a market value to someone and I assume we can sell the index/database index of images as a cache similar to what a search engine has, does this have any market value to you lot? Would we be eviscerated for trying? We're most certainly not after pissing anyone off, quite frankly. Anyone that has this would most certainly be a significant if not the largest player in the self-hosted gallery/mobile space.

All comments welcome!

MeatPounder · 2010-06-10, 12:24 AM

Quote:

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

.

InfoGuy · 2010-06-10, 03:23 AM

Regardless of whether your spider retrieved the images from free or member's areas, most images are probably copyrighted. Using or selling them for commercial gain without the copyright owner's permission is probably against the law. At the very least, it's unethical.

One important aspect of the adult industry is ensuring that all performers are 18+. How can you be sure that all your images comply with those laws?

That's an impressive collage. What software program did you use to create it?

I'm not a lawyer and these are only my personal opinions. If you need legal advice, seek qualified legal counsel.

Greenguy · 2010-06-10, 04:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by InfoGuy

Regardless of whether your spider retrieved the images from free or member's areas, most images are probably copyrighted. Using or selling them for commercial gain without the copyright owner's permission is probably against the law. At the very least, it's unethical.

One important aspect of the adult industry is ensuring that all performers are 18+. How can you be sure that all your images comply with those laws?...[/i]

I'll 2nd these statements.

bouncey · 2010-06-10, 04:59 AM

We understand they're copy-written, we're obviously not contesting this. If we were just bastards we'd be trying to sell this without attempting to chat to the adult webmaster community for advice first.

With regards to the girls being legal, basically we just checked for the 2257 keyword in the source domain (keywords were indexed with the gallery pages), and then just hired a very happy intern to check the 11k source domains between projects for confirmation. The images are almost all entirely from the sample/preview sections it seems. As a rough idea, we also have 1.2 million photos of random house pets, 5million images of beaches, which are somewhat less useful as a possible coherent source.

We fully appreciate the selling of it is unethical, which is why we aren't. The sort of thing we were suggesting is access to the database for analytics, or a search index with an image cache, or RGB/similar image matching. As we have the complete image tree, for example, we can do things like:

* Upload an image and anyone with this can probably tell you the source of the image (DB contains the hash fingerprint)
* Find similar images by RGB
* If you like a set of images, giving the database an image can tell you where to get more
* Putting in a URL can probably correlate to a complete list of competitor sites in your area
* Is the list of 300k galleries worth anything, you could instantly build a massive TGP
* We see the images as purely a cache, we own the database not the images, for example if you totally ignore the images we have 3.5 million thumbnails, resized and optimised to a high level and the source they came from. I would assume if someone just used the thumbnails and affiliate linked to the source domain it wouldn't provoke outrage?
* Stats? In seconds we can see that there's a 86% to 14% ratio of usage of the word "cunt" to "dick" on the keywords for these galleries, and other pointless but vaguely interesting details
* What about source domains that no longer exist? We basically have a record of what they offered

This is just 5 minutes doodling thought, as you can tell we do primarily business intelligence.

Once again I'll re-iterate that we're not after selling images, and if we get a generally negative reaction we'll bin/wipe the whole project. The only possible way we would consider monetisation would be as an information resource / access to the database. I was after "off the wall" possible suggestions, such as the ones above, which is why I'm here. It just seems a shame to wipe such a vast possible resource. As mentioned, we're basically freely giving away bandwidth at the moment on the test site and generating about 20k clicks/mo to the source domains with no money/ads involved what so ever.

bouncey · 2010-06-10, 05:00 AM

Oh and @InfoGuy I wrote the quick python script myself, rendering takes a couple of hours for a 800x600 image

bouncey · 2010-06-10, 05:52 AM

Oh and if anyone is interested if they send me a high resolution (1366x768 or similar) copy of their logo I'll "collage" it just for the hell of it.

Bill · 2010-06-10, 05:59 AM

Kinda hard to say what you could use it for.

We've seen similar things over the years, sadly, mostly in the context of "wow look at all this free porn we collected we oughta be able to sell it.". Hence the tendency to immediately compare what you've done to similar earlier projects.

Using it as a device to track down stolen IP suggests itself, but these days there would be more interest in tracking stolen video.

The current 'problems to be solved' affecting the industry dont immediately suggest how you could legally monetize such a database if you are thinking of it as a database of content.

but maybe there are aspects of it that could be used for something. something that doesn't immediately leap to mind lol.

bouncey · 2010-06-10, 06:07 AM

Yeah, we were braced for some attacks but I hope we've attempted to distinguish ourselves from quick-buck grabbing thieves.

Fair enough, if there's no interest in it at all for a couple of months it'll get wiped as we migrate datacenters anyway.

We've licensed the index (that's the index, not some other peoples pictures) of famous landmark interiors (some 1.1 million) to a company that's developing picture to 3D environment mapping, for example.

Simon · 2010-06-10, 07:00 AM

Hello bouncey,

Nice to see someone asking about this in an intelligent fashion. Usually someone will just bumble off blindly monetizing what they have and then drop by to ask us how they can promote their bad idea.

A few quick points, some of which you may know...

• A lot of adult traffic these days seems to be migrating to video sites, including of course those evil tubes which use other people's content without permission to fill their own pockets with cash.

• Unfortunately there has been a tsunami of free porn flooding the Net for years now, mostly due to sponsors competing with each other to see who can release more free porn to entice surfers to pay for porn. (Not always the best way to do things.)

• Most webmasters working in the adult market are not involved in producing content, and most do not own paysites or affiliate/sponsor programs, but are instead marketers using a variety of techniques to drive traffic to other people's paysites.

I made those points to lay a foundation for saying that while I think the database/archive may have some value, it may not be worth much to anyone in adult but you at this point. Things like competitive research, IP protection, and the need for in-depth data about each photograph are not things that have much place in the adult sphere, where thousands of (very similar) new photos and videos are released each week as new promotional materials. This is quite different from famous landmark interiors, which are mostly unchanging I would think.

You mentioned being able to build a massive TGP with 300K galleries. Most of the webmasters around here who are competent with TGP scripts could probably do that in an afternoon, or certainly a weekend, using data import and rss feeds from sponsors. No need to host the large photos, all galleries will have the sponsor graphics on them to help sell the paysite memberships, and the sponsors' 2257 links on the bottom of each gallery. There are even sites like FreeHostedGalleries.com where you get the data to import over 2.5 million galleries with a few hours work.

You said you got around a million pageviews and sent 106K clicks out to sponsors. (How many unique visitors to your site was that?) If you didn't sign up for the sponsor programs and didn't use affiliate links, then it's hard to judge the value of that traffic. A lot of TGP sites have really, really crappy traffic. The number of signups generated from the number of unique visitors to your site, and from the number of unique visitors sent to each sponsor is what you want to know, and then the important number is how much does your traffic earn per unique visitor you send to a sponsor (even though most do not pay per click).

Maybe with a bit more coffee I could come up with a use for what you've accumulated. If I had all of that in my hands I'm sure I'd think of something to do with it, but I might not do it. What I mean is I have good ideas all the time that I don't do because I don't think there's enough return for the investment of time/energy/funds that it would take to make the idea come to life.

Oh well, I guess I had too many words in my head this morning. Not sure if any of this will be helpful to you, but I hope some is.

Simon

bouncey · 2010-06-10, 07:16 AM

Thanks for the comments, yep that's about what we suspected from the TGP side of things. With regards to scale, we could easily expand this to 10million images with no real effort if we actually attempted this seriously and not as a semi-accidental byproduct.

Given current feedback, we might just offer free collage web based services (upload a photo, get a collage by email) to make pointless massive montages and kill the rest, we have no interest in marketing our own adult brand, and we're well aware that everyone has gone video/tubey.

I agree entirely on the traffic point, but we're unlikely to bother setting up affiliate programs to test the conversion rates.

Any idea what an appropriately short sex-related 8 letter .com / matching mobile domain name with 160-170k fully indexed adult links, a couple of first page popular term results and Google sitelinks is worth?

An interesting dabble in the market, now probably back to more serious matters

If anyone has any questions you're welcome to send a PM.

Useless · 2010-06-10, 07:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bouncey

We understand they're copy-written...

Copyrighted.

That is all. Please continue.

bouncey · 2010-06-10, 07:31 AM

Ironically I correct other people all the time.

Consider my head hung in shame.

Ramster · 2010-06-10, 09:21 AM

First thought is the images are copyrighted so what you are doing is illegal.

But what got me is you say these "galleries" are linking back to the original web site? How is that? So you're saying each gallery that has logos or watermarks on them are linking back to the original site? And which site, the watermarked site or the site you crawled them from?

If that is the case that is a bit different. You would be selling in essence galleries for promotion, not stolen content. (this being very vague of course because as you crawled the content and did not get it from sponsor approved webmaster area resources)

If the content is legal to use linking to the original sponsor or web site owner then you could use ti to build a massive blog.

bouncey · 2010-06-10, 09:31 AM

As it's a giant database, we know exactly where each image came from (which domain / URL), we just link back to the domain each image was found on, currently.

Yes, effectively it's promoting other sites promo galleries for free at the moment, which we consider to be ethically fine given it's purely costing us money and there's no ads at all or affiliate links of any kind.

Although, as discussed, the whole site will probably die soon.

ArtWilliams · 2010-06-10, 09:40 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Useless Warrior

Copyrighted.

That is all. Please continue.

Two words ... cross sells!

freakin · 2010-06-10, 09:40 AM

Sounds like you made your decision, but if you really have all that content hosted on your website for free, 10k of traffic per day without making much effort is pretty normal.

Greenguy · 2010-06-10, 11:18 AM

What would you do if these were Hollywood movies of TV shows?

bouncey · 2010-06-10, 11:35 AM

A direct analogy would be "What would we do if they were the trailers for movies and promos for TV shows", but probably the same as we're doing now? Generating some large fingerprinting and colour based heuristic database in a tree format. Perhaps make some graphical derivative work as art maybe.

Derivative art like in the above example of the collage is OK legally, for example.

No, we wouldn't sell TV clips or movie trailers either... Being an actual serious internet company we are quite well versed in media ownership, cheers.

tickler · 2010-06-10, 02:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bouncey

With regards to the girls being legal, basically we just checked for the 2257 keyword in the source domain (keywords were indexed with the gallery pages), and then just hired a very happy intern to check the 11k source domains between projects for confirmation.

There may be some holes there, because not all webmasters are in the USA and subject to American 2257 labeling rules and content regulations.

You apparently are in the USA! |tomato|

I would STRONGLY recommend that you have a lawyer explain to you exactly what 2257 conditions may apply in your situation.

bouncey · 2010-06-10, 06:23 PM

Actually we're European

We just like being thorough.

InfoGuy · 2010-06-11, 04:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bill

Using it as a device to track down stolen IP suggests itself, but these days there would be more interest in tracking stolen video.

I would agree that IP protection, especially that of video content would be the most logical application for your database. Have you been indexing video content as well as images? Is it possible to match original videos in .WMV or .MPG to converted .FLV videos uploaded to illegal tube sites? Can optical character recognition be used to read watermarks embedded into images/videos and identify content owners?

Perhaps, your database can be filtered for certain terms indicating piracy (i.e. torrents, warez, Rapidshare, etc.) and content owners can be alerted when their images/videos are posted. A service offering quick, automated and accurate information on pirated content would be very helpful in battling piracy.

Jel · 2010-06-12, 01:10 AM

It's early here, so forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't your basic question:

We aren't currently monetizing these images we don't have copyright for, and are themselves copyrighted, but would like to, so how do we go about that?

MeatPounder · 2010-06-12, 06:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jel

It's early here, so forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't your basic question:

We aren't currently monetizing these images we don't have copyright for, and are themselves copyrighted, but would like to, so how do we go about that?

As I said before

Quote:

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

ecchi · 2010-06-12, 07:26 PM

I get a lot of traffic from Google image searches, not brilliant traffic, but good enough to make money from it. They use thumbnails of my copyright images, so technically are stealing from me, but I don't mind because I make money from it. And presumably Google make money from their image searches. So maybe you could do something like Google's image search?

Although taking on Google in one of their main business areas gotta be like getting into a boxing ring with Mike Tyson when he was in his prime!

2010-06-09, 09:42 PM	#1
bouncey Rock stars ... is there anything they don't know? Join Date: Jun 2010 Posts: 10	Adult business advice / general question Hey Everyone, new to the forum here, I've posted this on another forum but this one seems a more sensible place to ask a business question. My appologies for the wall of text and tl;dr factor, it's too complex an issue to cover in a couple of lines. We have a somewhat unique and bizarre problem that maybe you can help me with. Lets start by saying that I run a fairly serious internet tech company (no, we're not selling anything) and we're not really interested in the adult market at all (but we're certainly not naive [apparently forums hate the doube-dotted 'i']). We have a lot of random side projects, and some of them develop into possible marketable ideas, some are just fun, and some just wander off and die in the corner. OK! So brief background done, onto the point why I'm on some forums. One of our side projects was a semi-intelligent (very polite) AI bot which half-decided to be a web crawler (we specialise in experimental high performance computing and massive datasets) which trundled off and indexed parts of the web without much oversight. We obviously didn't really think this through, as a massive percentage of the internet is porn. To cut a long story short, it basically downloaded some 90million large images and indexed them, some 10% were adult/porn. We've since stopped it. Of these 10%, about 3.5 million are from known/trusted/verifiable websites (ie: not untagged images on Imgur or other possible dodgy sources, had proper adult tags) and most of them are grouped into sets / galleries. I suppose you could consider this a cached index of free galleries. Not being a adult company and not being bastards (we're obviously not going to resell this, we're not thieves) we've not really done anything at all with it. We made a very quick TGP style gallery, but quite frankly the number of images is pretty staggering, along with a little play (smartphone) mobile site. Before you all shout about how we're heathenous people no better than the tube* site, the example gallery is completely non-profit (no ads or banners at all), we're paying personally for the bandwidth out of pocket, and each sample gallery on the site has a direct non-affiliated link back to where it came from, so we're giving back to the industry for free at the moment, and hopefully they see that (we've had no complaints). We've generated about 106,000 clicks off our site to the original sources since launch a few months ago, this sounds pretty good from what I've seen of the industry stats. We completely ignored the project since setting it up and with no marketing what so ever it gets about a million page views a quarter (300kish a month), which translates into about 2mbit of bandwidth (nothing to our current network, really). The mobile site gets a couple of hundred hits, effectively zero from a business perspective. So, basically, we have some project that could be interesting, we have no idea what the industry thinks about it (why we're asking here) - if there's a general outcry we'll probably just kill it as we don't need the hassle. It's almost certainly the largest private collection of adult images in clean categorisations on the internet from what we can see, it totals about 280GB of raw images. In fact, we have so much porn we can do completely ridiculous stuff like this (not that you need it here, but WARNING, PORN, NSFW etc.): http://i.imgur.com/8LKRO.jpg These are massively low res cutups, the originals are about 80mb and are some 10000px wide, yes each of those little squares is a different porn image. Some stats for the nerdy / webmaster people on here: about 3.5 million categorised images, in about 35 categories if you looked at each image as your day job (one image every 5 seconds, 9-5, working week) it would take you 2.4 years to see each one they're all progressive 80% quality JPEGs, with thumbnails, web optimised total size is about 280GB we have the following reference data in an index: images, image size, R/G/B index, overall gallery quality, gallery category, gallery source domain and URL, and some other stuff in a RDBMS schema absolutely none, 0%, of the images are from members areas (only free areas are crawled, for obvious reasons), so providing you're not evil it should be usable The test domain/gallery site has 160k fully Google indexed URLs, and has Google sitelinks Approximately 300,000 galleries, about 11-12 images per gallery The full database dumped as raw SQL is about 1GB uncompressed So basically, any ideas what to do with this? I assume it has a market value to someone and I assume we can sell the index/database index of images as a cache similar to what a search engine has, does this have any market value to you lot? Would we be eviscerated for trying? We're most certainly not after pissing anyone off, quite frankly. Anyone that has this would most certainly be a significant if not the largest player in the self-hosted gallery/mobile space. All comments welcome! Last edited by bouncey; 2010-06-09 at 10:08 PM..

2010-06-10, 03:23 AM	#3
InfoGuy I want to set the record straight - I thought the cop was a prostitute Join Date: Jul 2008 Location: Los Angeles Posts: 297	Regardless of whether your spider retrieved the images from free or member's areas, most images are probably copyrighted. Using or selling them for commercial gain without the copyright owner's permission is probably against the law. At the very least, it's unethical. One important aspect of the adult industry is ensuring that all performers are 18+. How can you be sure that all your images comply with those laws? That's an impressive collage. What software program did you use to create it? I'm not a lawyer and these are only my personal opinions. If you need legal advice, seek qualified legal counsel. __________________ Free Speech Coalition \| Boycott .XXX / ICM Registry

2010-06-10, 04:59 AM	#5
bouncey Rock stars ... is there anything they don't know? Join Date: Jun 2010 Posts: 10	We understand they're copy-written, we're obviously not contesting this. If we were just bastards we'd be trying to sell this without attempting to chat to the adult webmaster community for advice first. With regards to the girls being legal, basically we just checked for the 2257 keyword in the source domain (keywords were indexed with the gallery pages), and then just hired a very happy intern to check the 11k source domains between projects for confirmation. The images are almost all entirely from the sample/preview sections it seems. As a rough idea, we also have 1.2 million photos of random house pets, 5million images of beaches, which are somewhat less useful as a possible coherent source. We fully appreciate the selling of it is unethical, which is why we aren't. The sort of thing we were suggesting is access to the database for analytics, or a search index with an image cache, or RGB/similar image matching. As we have the complete image tree, for example, we can do things like: * Upload an image and anyone with this can probably tell you the source of the image (DB contains the hash fingerprint) * Find similar images by RGB * If you like a set of images, giving the database an image can tell you where to get more * Putting in a URL can probably correlate to a complete list of competitor sites in your area * Is the list of 300k galleries worth anything, you could instantly build a massive TGP * We see the images as purely a cache, we own the database not the images, for example if you totally ignore the images we have 3.5 million thumbnails, resized and optimised to a high level and the source they came from. I would assume if someone just used the thumbnails and affiliate linked to the source domain it wouldn't provoke outrage? * Stats? In seconds we can see that there's a 86% to 14% ratio of usage of the word "cunt" to "dick" on the keywords for these galleries, and other pointless but vaguely interesting details * What about source domains that no longer exist? We basically have a record of what they offered This is just 5 minutes doodling thought, as you can tell we do primarily business intelligence. Once again I'll re-iterate that we're not after selling images, and if we get a generally negative reaction we'll bin/wipe the whole project. The only possible way we would consider monetisation would be as an information resource / access to the database. I was after "off the wall" possible suggestions, such as the ones above, which is why I'm here. It just seems a shame to wipe such a vast possible resource. As mentioned, we're basically freely giving away bandwidth at the moment on the test site and generating about 20k clicks/mo to the source domains with no money/ads involved what so ever. Last edited by bouncey; 2010-06-10 at 05:06 AM..

2010-06-10, 07:00 AM	#10
Simon That which does not kill us, will try, try again. Join Date: Aug 2003 Location: Conch Republic Posts: 5,150	Hello bouncey, Nice to see someone asking about this in an intelligent fashion. Usually someone will just bumble off blindly monetizing what they have and then drop by to ask us how they can promote their bad idea. A few quick points, some of which you may know... • A lot of adult traffic these days seems to be migrating to video sites, including of course those evil tubes which use other people's content without permission to fill their own pockets with cash. • Unfortunately there has been a tsunami of free porn flooding the Net for years now, mostly due to sponsors competing with each other to see who can release more free porn to entice surfers to pay for porn. (Not always the best way to do things.) • Most webmasters working in the adult market are not involved in producing content, and most do not own paysites or affiliate/sponsor programs, but are instead marketers using a variety of techniques to drive traffic to other people's paysites. I made those points to lay a foundation for saying that while I think the database/archive may have some value, it may not be worth much to anyone in adult but you at this point. Things like competitive research, IP protection, and the need for in-depth data about each photograph are not things that have much place in the adult sphere, where thousands of (very similar) new photos and videos are released each week as new promotional materials. This is quite different from famous landmark interiors, which are mostly unchanging I would think. You mentioned being able to build a massive TGP with 300K galleries. Most of the webmasters around here who are competent with TGP scripts could probably do that in an afternoon, or certainly a weekend, using data import and rss feeds from sponsors. No need to host the large photos, all galleries will have the sponsor graphics on them to help sell the paysite memberships, and the sponsors' 2257 links on the bottom of each gallery. There are even sites like FreeHostedGalleries.com where you get the data to import over 2.5 million galleries with a few hours work. You said you got around a million pageviews and sent 106K clicks out to sponsors. (How many unique visitors to your site was that?) If you didn't sign up for the sponsor programs and didn't use affiliate links, then it's hard to judge the value of that traffic. A lot of TGP sites have really, really crappy traffic. The number of signups generated from the number of unique visitors to your site, and from the number of unique visitors sent to each sponsor is what you want to know, and then the important number is how much does your traffic earn per unique visitor you send to a sponsor (even though most do not pay per click). Maybe with a bit more coffee I could come up with a use for what you've accumulated. If I had all of that in my hands I'm sure I'd think of something to do with it, but I might not do it. What I mean is I have good ideas all the time that I don't do because I don't think there's enough return for the investment of time/energy/funds that it would take to make the idea come to life. Oh well, I guess I had too many words in my head this morning. Not sure if any of this will be helpful to you, but I hope some is. Simon __________________ "If you're happy and you know it, think again." -- Guru Pitka

2010-06-10, 09:21 AM	#14
Ramster Life is good Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Ottawa, Canada Posts: 11,693	First thought is the images are copyrighted so what you are doing is illegal. But what got me is you say these "galleries" are linking back to the original web site? How is that? So you're saying each gallery that has logos or watermarks on them are linking back to the original site? And which site, the watermarked site or the site you crawled them from? If that is the case that is a bit different. You would be selling in essence galleries for promotion, not stolen content. (this being very vague of course because as you crawled the content and did not get it from sponsor approved webmaster area resources) If the content is legal to use linking to the original sponsor or web site owner then you could use ti to build a massive blog. __________________ Pornstar Legends \| Live Cam Model Shows \| Hungarian Girls Skype: robmurray999

2010-06-10, 05:00 AM	#6
bouncey Rock stars ... is there anything they don't know? Join Date: Jun 2010 Posts: 10	Oh and @InfoGuy I wrote the quick python script myself, rendering takes a couple of hours for a 800x600 image

2010-06-10, 05:52 AM	#7
bouncey Rock stars ... is there anything they don't know? Join Date: Jun 2010 Posts: 10	Oh and if anyone is interested if they send me a high resolution (1366x768 or similar) copy of their logo I'll "collage" it just for the hell of it.

2010-06-10, 05:59 AM	#8
Bill Selling porn allows me to stay in a constant state of Bliss - ain't that a trip! Join Date: Apr 2003 Posts: 3,914	Kinda hard to say what you could use it for. We've seen similar things over the years, sadly, mostly in the context of "wow look at all this free porn we collected we oughta be able to sell it.". Hence the tendency to immediately compare what you've done to similar earlier projects. Using it as a device to track down stolen IP suggests itself, but these days there would be more interest in tracking stolen video. The current 'problems to be solved' affecting the industry dont immediately suggest how you could legally monetize such a database if you are thinking of it as a database of content. but maybe there are aspects of it that could be used for something. something that doesn't immediately leap to mind lol.

2010-06-10, 06:07 AM	#9
bouncey Rock stars ... is there anything they don't know? Join Date: Jun 2010 Posts: 10	Yeah, we were braced for some attacks but I hope we've attempted to distinguish ourselves from quick-buck grabbing thieves. Fair enough, if there's no interest in it at all for a couple of months it'll get wiped as we migrate datacenters anyway. We've licensed the index (that's the index, not some other peoples pictures) of famous landmark interiors (some 1.1 million) to a company that's developing picture to 3D environment mapping, for example.

2010-06-10, 07:16 AM	#11
bouncey Rock stars ... is there anything they don't know? Join Date: Jun 2010 Posts: 10	Thanks for the comments, yep that's about what we suspected from the TGP side of things. With regards to scale, we could easily expand this to 10million images with no real effort if we actually attempted this seriously and not as a semi-accidental byproduct. Given current feedback, we might just offer free collage web based services (upload a photo, get a collage by email) to make pointless massive montages and kill the rest, we have no interest in marketing our own adult brand, and we're well aware that everyone has gone video/tubey. I agree entirely on the traffic point, but we're unlikely to bother setting up affiliate programs to test the conversion rates. Any idea what an appropriately short sex-related 8 letter .com / matching mobile domain name with 160-170k fully indexed adult links, a couple of first page popular term results and Google sitelinks is worth? An interesting dabble in the market, now probably back to more serious matters If anyone has any questions you're welcome to send a PM.

2010-06-10, 07:31 AM	#13
bouncey Rock stars ... is there anything they don't know? Join Date: Jun 2010 Posts: 10	Ironically I correct other people all the time. Consider my head hung in shame.

2010-06-10, 09:31 AM	#15
bouncey Rock stars ... is there anything they don't know? Join Date: Jun 2010 Posts: 10	As it's a giant database, we know exactly where each image came from (which domain / URL), we just link back to the domain each image was found on, currently. Yes, effectively it's promoting other sites promo galleries for free at the moment, which we consider to be ethically fine given it's purely costing us money and there's no ads at all or affiliate links of any kind. Although, as discussed, the whole site will probably die soon.

2010-06-10, 09:40 AM	#17
freakin Aw, Dad, you've done a lot of great things, but you're a very old man, and old people are useless Join Date: May 2010 Posts: 22	Sounds like you made your decision, but if you really have all that content hosted on your website for free, 10k of traffic per day without making much effort is pretty normal.

2010-06-10, 11:18 AM	#18
Greenguy The Original Greenguy (Est'd 1996) & AVN HOF Member - I Crop Pics For Thumbs In My Sleep Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: Blasdell, NY (shithole suburb south of Buffalo) Posts: 41,787	What would you do if these were Hollywood movies of TV shows? __________________ Promote POV Porn Cash By Building & Submitting Galleries to the Porn Luv Network

2010-06-10, 11:35 AM	#19
bouncey Rock stars ... is there anything they don't know? Join Date: Jun 2010 Posts: 10	A direct analogy would be "What would we do if they were the trailers for movies and promos for TV shows", but probably the same as we're doing now? Generating some large fingerprinting and colour based heuristic database in a tree format. Perhaps make some graphical derivative work as art maybe. Derivative art like in the above example of the collage is OK legally, for example. No, we wouldn't sell TV clips or movie trailers either... Being an actual serious internet company we are quite well versed in media ownership, cheers.

2010-06-10, 06:23 PM	#21
bouncey Rock stars ... is there anything they don't know? Join Date: Jun 2010 Posts: 10	Actually we're European We just like being thorough.

2010-06-12, 01:10 AM	#23
Jel I'm the only guy in the world who has to wake up to have a nightmare Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: London, United Kingdom Posts: 1,895	It's early here, so forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't your basic question: We aren't currently monetizing these images we don't have copyright for, and are themselves copyrighted, but would like to, so how do we go about that?

2010-06-12, 07:26 PM	#25
ecchi Banned Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: About to be evicted!!!! Posts: 4,082	I get a lot of traffic from Google image searches, not brilliant traffic, but good enough to make money from it. They use thumbnails of my copyright images, so technically are stealing from me, but I don't mind because I make money from it. And presumably Google make money from their image searches. So maybe you could do something like Google's image search? Although taking on Google in one of their main business areas gotta be like getting into a boxing ring with Mike Tyson when he was in his prime!