When you host your stuff on a Web site that’s free and that you don’t control some nasty crap can happen. Yesterday MySpace started blocking Photobucket stuff.
My blog is hosted on WordPress.com and I have the same issues the MySpace folks are seeing (the free service where my blog is hosted right now, which is different from the software that you host on your own servers).
The thing is when a company is hosting your stuff for free they need to see some way to make money off of the service. This isn’t going to be free with no ads forever and ever. And, it certainly would piss me off if I worked on WordPress.com if someone came along and made money from my user’s photos and videos.
If you want to avoid these issues there’s really one choice: pay for your site’s own hosting and build your own traffic. One reason to join services like MySpace and WordPress.com is that there’s a built-in level of traffic — the home page on WordPress.com regularly drives hundreds, if not thousands of visitors to even new sites every day. If you go off and build your own site you don’t have those advantages, but you’ve got to live with when they pull down parasitic services, which is what Photobucket is.
This will chill investment in parasitic services for MySpace, though.
What do you think?
Oh, and I’m very happy with the deal I’m getting here at WordPress.com. Yeah, I can’t run every gadget, or do advertising, and there are some other limitations, but overall the service is really great.
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