will bandwidth cost more than revenue if i allow gif hotlinking ?
 

i am starting pin site which will have images and gif.,

will bandwidth cost more than revenue if i allow gif hotliking ?

i am asking this , so i can include html5 player and add mp4 and webm versions of gif .

anyone done this ?

i know bandwidth charges will be high as each gif takes around 1mb to 4 mb. but i wanted to make sure, they dont be more than revenue from advertisement selling.

is it a good idea to allow hotlinking to images on server ? and even bigger images like .gif

thanks for your time.

my other thinking is that,
if tube sites can make money y hosting full length videos then it should be profiting .

but on tube site , video only gets loaded when user hits play button and is downloaded in parts.,

while in my case, gif will be downloaded and played automatically, so like 30-35 images will be downlaoded on each main page load .

what your thoughts. ?

Nobody can answer your question without knowing what you are paying for bandwidth and what you are making for revenue in exchange for the hotlinking you are provided.

I wouldn't let people hot link. You can have an embed button though that has a watermark and a link back to your site.

Don't let your affiliates hotlink. Even if you have small images and a dirt-cheap bandwidth plan, an affiliate that has tons of shitty traffic and or one who ads your gifs in pop-ups and pop-unders can cost you alot and even slow down your servers.

You are already giving your affiliates lots of tools to promote your products, and you are paying them to do it. If they bitch and moan about wanting hotlinking, ask them to prove their value to you first with a trial. If their traffic doesn't convert, tell them they have to host the images themselves.

But answer can be still given.

Basically , you need to simulate bandwidth burn by making a hotlink from other site , download thumb or multiple page, see howmuch it spend, and then multiply it by 1000 times so you can know howmuch bandwidth 1000 hits will spend.
I have picture sites with galleries where each gallery contain 16 pics, and it get hotlinked often, but it doesnt spend much bandwith simply because usually is just one pic hotlinked , and hotlink sites usually hotlinks thousands of pics from thousands of different sites and they dont have much traffic as most of traffic goes to tubes anyway.
Benefits of hotlink is traffic and potential free backlink, tho to properly exploit that you will need to analyze each hotlink site to see how it benefit or does not benefit you . If you want just avoid hassle and dont bother with it all, then just dont allow it, as in the end it's not really worth to bother it with it anyway.

i am staring new pin site like pinterest in adult , just like sex.com
and i am staring with regular dedicted server which offers 10 tb bandwidth with server.
now i dont have site ready so no visitors and no revenue yet.

yes, that is great idea. allow iframe embeds but not direct gif hotlinking. thanks

its not regarding affiliate program, its new site i am working on, like sex.com or imagezog dot com.

thanks

Since it's a brand-new project, that makes it even harder for anyone to answer.

When starting a new project, create a budget and a list of expectations and also a timeline that you are okay with losing money. Once that timeline passes if you have burned through your budget, are not seeing progress, and your expectations are nowhere close to being met... shuttle.

Realistically though you are better off spending that budget and energy on a project of yours that is already showing promise or profitable. Reinventing wheels always sounds like fun but rarely produces the results we hope for.

thank you.

i dont have much traffic of my own and want to start somewhere, so this is my try to generate traffic. ,will see how it goes.,