I was just watching the Drudge Report site load, as it refreshes every so often if you keep it open, when I noticed a delay and saw the URLs in my browser’s status bar for images that were loading very slowly on the page. First it was one for Yahoo! images, then it was one for The Smoking Gun. How odd.
So I pulled up the source for the page and rightclicked all the images in question and found that four of the six images on the whole page were hosted elsewhere. Details on three of them below.
The first image of Senators John Kerry and John Edwards goes to photo #1 at yimg.com. The image to the lower left of the screencap leads to this photo at iWon.com’s imgfarm.com site. And the “teddy bear” in the middle goes to this image at The Smoking Gun. None of these photos are hosted on Drudge’s server.
Now Drudge *could* have some arrangement with MyWay, Yahoo!, and The Smoking Gun stating that they would host images he was going to have on his page - it wouldn’t be the first time something unexpected had happened on the Internet. But if Yahoo! images were to be hosting pictures for anyone who wanted to use them, especially someone with nine million visits a day, it would be a very unexpected thing.
So, I gave a call to The Smoking Gun - they weren’t aware of this specific instance, but knew it had been happening. Their rationale: lots of people are doing it, and “taking” far bigger things than what Matt Drudge was using, so they aren’t saying anything about it. I asked if they were concerned about the bandwidth for someone getting 9 or so million visits a day and was informed that it the effect was “minimal.” I also contacted the public relations office for Ask Jeeves (the parent of MyWay) and Matt Drudge himself - but have not received responses as of this point.
So how does this work - if Drudge thinks a site will get bombarded with requests and be shut down based on using one of my hosted images, he’ll copy it for placement on his server, but if he thinks that no one will notice/care, he doesn’t?
