
Show HN: User-owned image sharing - rgbrgb
https://surfer.io/
======
rgbrgb
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](https://surfer.io/t1Uft)

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

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rgbrgb
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.

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

~~~
frakkingcylons
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.

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

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

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pearjuice
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.

~~~
rgbrgb
Thanks bro!

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

[https://surfer.io/BkJ3L](https://surfer.io/BkJ3L)

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

Edit: the point was made.

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

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ereckers
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.

~~~
gingerlime
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.

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sprite
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.

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Blahah
Any idea why they got banned from adsense?

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nacs
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.

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Sir_Cmpwn
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](https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush)

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

[http://mediagoblin.org/](http://mediagoblin.org/)

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Sir_Cmpwn
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).

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state
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](https://surfer.io/terms.html)

~~~
rgbrgb
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!

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mintplant
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.

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frakkingcylons
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.

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

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Jhsto
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.

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

~~~
rgbrgb
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.

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

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Robadob
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).

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

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

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

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gus_massa
Is checking each image compatible with the DMCA safe harbor?

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

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

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

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

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

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bratsche
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?

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ttsda
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](http://imgur.com/99kuTjE) took 3000ms to load,
[https://surfer.io/t1Uft](https://surfer.io/t1Uft) took 7000ms.

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

~~~
rgbrgb
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!

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ivanbrussik
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.

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

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atko
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!

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therealmarv
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.

~~~
rgbrgb
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.

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swinglock
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.

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sadfnjksdf
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.

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Kiro
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.

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Xcelerate
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

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

~~~
rgbrgb
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](https://github.com/jimmynicol/image-resizer)

