Craigslist: blocking a leech, or a feature? » mathewingram.com/work
Craigslist: blocking a leech, or a feature? » mathewingram.com/work:
Will they find a way to work with Listpic or just create their own? Listpic founder Ryan Sit says that he wasn’t aware the bandwidth issue would be a big problem, and that he would be happy to host the images and work with craigslist on co-operating. But is leeching a site’s images and hosting the best way to start such a relationship? Probably not. There’s some good discussion in the comments at Consumerist.
Here’s one of those interesting issues for which there is no simple answer.
But — if you’ll excuse me for re-arranging the English language to suit — if you create a site or service that Quid’s a site in some way, and you don’t have a Quo Pro to return value back to that site — then you shouldn’t be surprised that if you get popular, you get blocked.
So, I think the question here (and I don’t have a clue what the answer is) what Listpic did to improve Craigslist’s revenues and offeset the cost it imposed on Craigslist. the harder you have to look to find an answer, the less you can really justify Listpic’s position. And we can be really liberal about defining “revenue”, but at first glance, Listpic doesn’t even seem to be increasing traffic to Craigslist, os you can’t even count on really indirect benefits.
It all boils down the simple reality that there’s no free lunch. Either a relationship works for both parties, or it’s at best an unstable one that might be broken at any time. So when folks start building these sites that scrap and mash and share and reformat — they need to think about how what they’re doing benefits both sides of the interface. And — heck, what a concept — maybe even talking to the site you plan on scraping BEFORE launch to get these kind of silly details worked out. Permission does wonders…
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