What is Hotlinking, and Why Is It Bad?

Summary: Ah, the world of Internet crime. I have been hotlinked left, right and centre lately, so now I am going to rant about it. In essence: unsanctioned hotlinking is bad, it is unethical, it is theft, it is criminal.

Hotlink bandwidth theft, hotlinking, file leeching, bandwidth bandits, hot links, bandwidth leeching, hotlinks, external linking, remote linking, deep linking and direct linking are all words and phrases used to describe a single problem that many webmasters must stop or prevent, or are at least interested in stopping or preventing.

Hotlinking is an interesting, as well as a controversial topic, because it is:

• mostly not understood by the web user community
• often not understood by the web building community
• leading to heated debates
• fostering outright anger and frustration in web site owners
• sometimes leading to almost militant behaviour

What is Hotlinking?

So, what does hotlinking mean? "Hotlinking" (also called "hot linking", "leeching", and "bandwidth theft") is a term referring to when a web page of one website owner is direct linking to the images or other multimedia files located on the web host of another website owner.
When hotlinking is done without permission, it constitutes stealing bandwidth. This not only causes the other host to pay for the bandwidth of the hotlinked file, but often also constitutes intellectual property theft.

Now that sounds a mouthful — and it is!

Have a look at my web statistics! The traffic has increased 50-fold from August to October. You can also see that the first three days in December were as busy as each of the months prior to September. This will stop; as per December 4th, 2010, I have implemented hotlink protection on my website.

My web site bandwidth up to December 3rd 2010

Taking a Step Back

When I first started on the web in 1993, I hotlinked! We all did. Heck,  Harvard's first IT website did it.

The thinking at the time was to link, rather than duplicating web contents. So, wasn't it better to leave the file on the original site, where its origin was clear, and then use HTML to display the image on my own page, like this:

<img src="http://www.other-site.com/image.gif">

No! I did not think about how graphics are displayed on the web. Each and every time someone looks at a webpage, their browser has to "call up" the image host and say, "send that image file over to me." It is like making a phone call.

A few dozen people viewing a clipart gallery does not put too much load on the image host.

… but, what if twenty people want to display that graphic on their own web pages? What if two hundred people do? What if there are two hundred different web pages, ALL displaying that graphic, and there are ten people looking at EACH of those web pages? Multiply that by hours, days, and months, and then multiply that by the number of graphics being hotlinked — and you can easily see why hotlinking puts a substantial load on an image host. That load is bandwidth, and someone has to pay for it.

John McCain Busted for Hotlinking

In 2007, John McCain's MySpace page used hotlinked images without permission.

Since he was running for president, you can just imagine how much bandwidth that used!

The graphics' owner fought back by replacing one with  an embarrassing and amusing image.

McCain is lucky. Many people replace hotlinked graphics with something obscene.

The Cost of Bandwidth

Bandwidth is Like the Minutes on a Mobile Phone Plan

Transferring files from a web host over the internet uses bandwidth. Bandwidth is part of the cost of webhosting. When someone builds a website, they pay a fee to the webhost where their site — including the media content, such as images — is stored. Along with the storage space, the site is allotted a fixed amount of bandwidth per month.

When I exceed my bandwidth limit, there are penalties attached to it. Some webhosts take away high-speed internet and leave us on dialup speeds until the end of the month. Other webhosts temporarily shut down the site. PhotoBucket, a popular free image host, replaces images with a small, low-detail "bandwidth exceeded" graphic that uses very little memory. My webhost, like many others, charges me an extra fee for "exceeding my bandwidth". And worse, we may lose our site if we do not pay the penalty.

I have had to pay $10 in bandwidth penalties for the last three months in a row, because of other people (sites) hotlinking to my images.
When I got my first bill for excessive bandwidth, I thought: "Wow! people seem to like my pages."
When I got charged even more the following months I became suspicious, and analysed my web server's log files. The web server logs record every action my server has taken, or in other words, the logs show every page displayed, along with the content that was served.

So How Do You Avoid Hotlinking?

• Find a stock photo, public domain or Creative Commons graphic.
• Download the image to your computer.
• Upload the image to an image host, or host the images on your site (if you have your own web space)

Congratulations! You are a good web citizen!

HotLinkers Are At Risk!

One of the most common occurrences of "hot linking" is when people are forum posting and they hotlink pictures from another website to use as avatars or signature images on the message boards (forums). Some disadvantages of hotlinking worth considering are that the webpage generally loads slower when you link to images stored on a different web hosting server than the webpage is hosted on, and the owner of the image has full control to disable hotlinking, or delete, rename, or worse yet, do a "switcheroo"; i.e., switching the file name to be another image, which is sure to cause the hotlinker and the host of the hot-linked image embarrassment.

What Can Happen?

If someone hotlinks to me, I could sue under the copyright laws. Of course, this is highly unlikely… and who likes the lawyers anyway? 

However, hotlinks are ridiculously easy to track. When I discover a hotlinker at a forum, I may chose to email the forum owner. The forum thread may be deleted and the hotlinker may be banned from the web accounts s/he is using.

I could remove the image that is being hotlinked. The hotlinker now has a broken link and nothing of mine to look at.

Or I could perform a " switcheroo". In other words, I could simply change the image. Since hotlinkers are linking to files on someone else's web site, they have absolutely no control over the content…

I could replace the image with a few choice words. Or something along the lines of "This image has been HOTLINKED. Hotlinking is illegal and the person who posted this image is a criminal! Please view the original at www.max.grenkowitz.net"

Or I could get really quite obnoxious. Images could be replaced with porn (which leads to a higher probability that the hotlinker will be banned, since many forums do not allow porn). Images could be replaced with an image to make fun of the hotlinker, in a delightfully cruel way. Some inspiring web sites:

•  Image Lifting Imposter Prank
•  Switcheroo: Reasons Not to Direct Link Images

Hotlinking Prevention

So, what have I done to stop the bandwidth theft?

It took me a couple of days to think about an approach on how to stop the practice of hotlinking.

I eventually came up with a very efficient method to check from where people are pulling my images. In essence: if an image is not requested from my own site (or sites I have allowed to link, like forum sites I post frequently on), the hotlinked image is replaced with the following image:

No Hotlinking Allowed! This site is stealing bandwidth from www.max.grenkowitz.net

This works! Bandwidth theft and the related traffic has decreased to 20 percent! I am happy! 

Results

Just three examples of the some 400 websites that hotlink images from my web site to theirs.
The first images shows a forum post about Big Things in Australia, with a hotlinked image on it, that has now been replaced by my "No HotLinking Allowed" image. This post has fifteen hotlinks to my images, creating 1.4 MB of traffic alone every time this page is displayed on a users browser.

My No Hotlinking Image in a forum post

(Hint: Click on image to open lightbox. Hover either left or right over the image to browse through the images. ESC or mouse-click will close the lightbox.)

The following image is showing a section of a website that seems to deal in everything related to a Suzuki Burgman 650 Executive, yet it is simply a keyword cloud or scraper site — which has no use for anyone.

My No Hotlinking Image in an all Burgman scraper site

(Hint: Click on image to open lightbox. Hover either left or right over the image to browse through the images. ESC or mouse-click will close the lightbox.)

… similar this site: a useless scraper site!

My No Hotlinking Image in a keyword scraper site

(Hint: Click on image to open lightbox. Hover either left or right over the image to browse through the images. ESC or mouse-click will close the lightbox.)

This is Different: Affiliate Marketing and Embedded Content

If They Say It is Okay, It is Okay.

So, what about featuring product photos for affiliate marketing programs like Amazon Associates?

Most of these services give you HTML code, which often include hotlinked images. In that case, you do not need to worry about hotlinking it: They are providing photos to help you sell things for them.

Similarly, some sites like YouTube give "embed" code, which serve up video, images, and other content to be featured on a blog or other webpage. "Embedding" may be turned off by the user who uploaded that content. If it is on, then you may "embed" (hotlink) the content.

The key is that you must display their content using the code they give you.

Let us make sure that we do our part to give credit to photographers, artists, writers, and anyone who is offering their work for free… and avoid visiting sites who hotlink for their gain.

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