blog.enjoysthin.gs

A good deal of users on enjoysthin.gs use a feature that enables 1-click posting to their tumblr account. If you see something that you like and want to share it on tumblr, click a button and it end up on your tumblr site (example). Many of these users use this feature several times a day. They will be the last users allowed to do this.

As of today, I’ve disabled anyone from signing up for 1-click posting to tumblr. I am unwilling to store your passwords in my database, which is needed to use the tumblr API. In the event that tumblr implements an OAuth (or similar) API, I’ll be happy to re-enable this feature for everyone else.

As a developer, I really don’t like saving sensitive information if I don’t have to do it. As a matter of fact, I don’t even store your enjoysthin.gs password in the database, so if a hacker accessed the database, they still wouldn’t be able to see your password.

(If you’re already using this feature, you can continue to do so… until you email me and tell me to turn it off.)

My top referrers… in order.

• stumbleupon.com
• google.com
• images.google.com
• facebook.com
• twitter.com
• friendfeed.com

Other than the lack of tumblr, it’s not at all surprising. (Tumblr isn’t even in the top 10.)

I have many amazing artist friends. People who are getting ripped off all the time. I do not want to be the cause of that.

A few months ago, I quietly added a feature to enjoysthin.gs. A feature that only I could use. It allows me to blacklist entire domains from being enjoyed. So if boston.com wrote me and told me they didn’t want users enjoying things from the big picture, I’d just add them the blacklist and nobody would be able to do it anymore. Oddly enough, as much as I worried about it, nobody has ever requested it.

Until today.

Today a wonderful photographer called me out and asked me to remove his or her posts. Which I did.

In my day job, I am constantly dealing with the fact that people can copy our product and put it wherever they please. As a matter of fact, it’s a BIG part of what I look at. Notice that I didn’t say “problem that I’m trying to solve.” But there is no denying that is a big… um, issue. And I do not want to be part of the problem.

I recently released some software and didn’t know if I should be pleased or upset to find it available on pirate sites. (I took my good friend Scott’s advice and decided I should be both offended and honored.)

Since I know many photographers/artists, I want to ask you personally how to handle this.

I run a site where people can “enjoy” things they find on the internet. A side effect as that I make a copy of the image or text and serve it from my servers. This is not to hide the original posting of it. The entire reason that I rehost the image, is that I almost always get more traffic than the average artist’s site can handle. If I just used your image, you’d owe a lot of money to your hosting provider. To counter this, I ensure that if someone enjoys your image, they can’t editorialize about it at all. People can’t post a picture of a baby eating a lightbulb with the words “FAIL” unless you typed those words. I’m unconditionally true to the source…. something people almost never notice. Users cannot post anything but your image, it’s title and content. They cannot claim it’s theirs or write snarky comments about it. Not at all.

So my questions is this…

Is my only option to allow people to enjoy things on sites that agree to it? I know that that where I work, they’d never agree to it. They’d never even let me in the room to discuss it. Am I helping their bottom line in any way? No. Am I hurting it? I don’t think so, I’m not sending them more than 100s of hits a month. But then again, I’m the one who pays my crazy server bills every month. Not them. So perhaps I am helping their botton line in some way.

Either way. They don’t complain about it. Almost nobody ever has. But today someone did and I take it very seriously.

So, to all of my artist friends who post their life’s work online with the expectation that people like me don’t steal it. What should I do? Does the site need to be shut down? Is there something I can do that makes sense? I’m honestly looking for your thoughts. Jen, Justin, Noah, everybody. What should I do?

I’ve always tried to be open and publish any stats about enjoysthin.gs that I thought were intersting on this blog. I’ve posted number of them in the past about where my users were coming from, browser stats, even how I develop the site.

Today I wanted to write about the “TechCrunch effect.”

Yesterday, TechCrunch linked to enjoysthin.gs fairly early in the day. It was a link in a larger article about Tumblr and was reasonably positive in what it said, even if it was a bit misleading in what it said about me. Keep in mind, the main article was not about me, but I can easily compare it to other articles that link to the site, but were about enjoysthin.gs.

I was really surprised by what I found when I looked at the stats for the day.

First off, it was not a big day as far as traffic goes. Both visits and page views saw no significant bump from the link.

To put it in perspective, here is the link placement on two different sites. On the left was the last time I received a link from ReadWriteWeb and on the right is yesterday’s TechCrunch link. On the TechCrunch article, the link is above the fold. On the ReadWriteWeb article… well it’s not above the fold, let’s just leave it at that.

So, two different sites both link to me in articles that were not specifically about me. TechCrunch, according to compete, gets far more traffic than ReadWriteWeb. So logic would suggest that my metrics, traffic and otherwise, would spike from the TechCrunch link. That just didn’t happen. As I mentioned, traffic was essentially flat yesterday. Signups were flat too. I’d show you a graph, but it was flat, so you get the picture.

What about ReadWriteWeb? Well when they linked to me, with a link located so far down the page that it required two and a half miles of scrolling, all of the things that I measure spiked considerably. Even with the location of the link and considering the article was posted fairly late in the day (eastern time), I still saw a medium uptick in traffic and a huge increase in signups. So let’s compare the two, shall we?

The following chart shows the signups from the same day each of the articles were posted.

So despite the link location from the ReadWriteWeb article, almost twice as many users clicked through and signed up for the service.

I’m sure that if the article had been entirely about enjoysthin.gs, things wouldn’t be the same, but I wonder about how different they’d be? Who exactly is reading TechCrunch and why aren’t they clicking on the links? Are they just looking to find out who is getting bought and carrying on with their day? Do the real users of the web read ReadWriteWeb? Whatever is happening, it’s certainly interesting (and something I’ll never know for sure.)

In the past ReadWriteWeb has written about enjoysthin.gs, rather than just linking to it. That spike in signups was much more significant. Although it’s not a fair comparison, here it is: