The Daily Feed Issue #47: Facebook, In-Image ads and Image SEO update

Welcome to Issue #47 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. The Daily Feed is published several times a week when we have news, information and helpful tips to share. Unsubscribe instructions are at the end of this message.

On Monday you probably read the story the Wall Street Journal broke about a Facebook privacy debacle. Many of the most popular apps, including FarmVille, have been transmitting personally identifiable data to outside companies. The data was being transmitted to ad networks to help them build user profiles in order to better target ads. In response, Google engineer Brian Kennish has created a Chrome browser plugin called Facebook Disconnect that prevents your browser from sending data to Facebook servers as you surf the web. 

At Feedjit we're considering getting rid of our Facebook integration via Facebook Connect. We've always allowed our users to control what data we store and were the first analytics company to allow website visitors to remove data we logged for their IP address. Privacy is a big concern for us and we would rather err on the side of removing features to give you more control over your data. As a website owner I've also found their servers to be a lot slower than our own and during peak load times (8am Pacific time) the FB Connect API slows our site down. Email me if you have an opinion about this issue. 

The latest trend in online advertising is In-image ads. NPR is running a story on ad companies that will put ads on your site that sell fashion items that are being worn by the people in the photos on your site. For example on the celebrity gossip site, JustJared, you can click on the "Get the Look" tab beneath a photo in a story about pop star Rihanna filming a corn chip commercial and buy a cardigan sweater like hers for $195 from Piperlime. 

Ever heard of hotlink protection? If you have a site with a lot of photos, you've probably been hotlinked without even knowing it. Hotlinking is when a website embeds an image tag in their HTML that loads an image from a second site rather than storing the image on their own servers and loading it from there. If a site hotlinks it doesn't have to pay for the disk used to store that image and the bandwidth that is consumed when web browsers load the image. If you have a very popular web page and you hotlink images from someone else's server you can cost them a lot of money. 

Many sites use a technique called hotlink protection to prevent other websites from hotlinking their images. Hotlink protection detects if another website is loading an image you host and prevents the image from loading. There are reports that if you use hotlink protection, Google may remove you from their image search results. The reports are spotty and some webmasters who have protection in place are not reporting a problem yet, so keep an eye on this issue if it applies to you.

That's it for today's edition. You'll notice that the frequency of the Daily Feed is changing to slightly less than daily. We're focusing on delivering quality issues rather than quantity. As Plato once said: "Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.". So you may find that I miss a day here and there, but hopefully you'll notice an increase in quality. 

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO

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