BayImg: Google Ads + Porn Pictures
I like the idea behind Pirate Bay’s new image hosting venture Bay Image, which is free, unrestricted image hosting outside of political influence or police control. I like the idea that visual information can find a free home. However, they have a big problem at the moment, which is the massive amounts of porn being uploaded. Just take a look at their tag cloud and it becomes clear what BayImg really is: a free porn hosting site:
They have a “report image” link, but according to their terms on the front page, these kind of images are probably ok:
Bayimg is a place where you can host all your images. We do not censor them. We believe in freedom of speech, it’s of utter importance to us. As long as your pictures are legal they will be hosted here, but we reserve the right to remove images due to technical reasons though.
OK, that’s fine. You’re a website, you can host whatever you want. I don’t have a problem with that, but Google, who provides the advertisments for your site, probably does. You can’t run Adsense next to porn, it’s not allowed:
For the sake of the argument, take my word for it that horsie and friend are sharing more than a hug. So far, with 82,276 images and 1,753,943 photos, BayImg is set to explode on the image hosting scene, but let’s hope they can either solve their porn problem, or find a new advertising partner before Google drops them. I’m not even going to get started on how this looks for their public image or respectability…
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 11:14 pm and is tagged with pirate bay, porn problem, bayimg, horsie, google, freedom of speech, new advertising, visual information, political influence, advertisments, public image, image link, massive amounts, respectability, new image, free porn, sake, front page, images, photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
on July 24th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
You sound like you’re jealous, not concerned. Maybe your google ads next to porn project got canned? Either way you are playing the role of a rat not a blogger.
on July 24th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
Jealous!? No, I don’t have any interest in mashing up porn and image hosting, thank you very much.
on November 5th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
Quite amusing. Seeing as how I’ve yet to see any porn on BayImg it appears the problem has left all by itself.
on November 24th, 2007 at 2:45 am
Will: In order to see the vast majority of porn on bayimg you have to turn on “explicit content” in the preferences on the site. Some images slip thru the filters, but all in all they do about as good a job filtering as Google’s own image search.
As long as bayimg continues to make the best attempt to filter out porn, I doubt Google is going to do anything about it. Not to mention the Google guys have a clue and know damned well the pirate bay would turn it into a PR nightmare for them.