Most effective way to advertise an image hosting site?
 

What's up GFY,
So I just put together favimg.com, but I don't know how to get people to start using it. What would you guys do if you had a new image hosting site? Buy traffic? Adwords? I'm trying to get people to start using it at forums to create backlinks for me, so I've been messaging forum admins to try to get them to promote my site for me because right now lots of people are using tinypic and photobucket which suck because bandwidth limits get exceeded really fast. What would you do if it were your site?

you can run some PPC campaigns maybe?

99.9% chance you will be hated here real soon.

Sites like that host lots of stolen content.

Open a pay-per-view program. Pay users per 1k page views they send to your site through their uploads. Goto all the blackhat forums and post a "How I made $5,000/month uploading pix to image hosts" thread with a link to your program. Let the pirates do the work for you. Then terminate their accounts when it comes time to pay them, claiming illegal activity. Setup a bunch of dummy accounts so you can make posts from users as "getting paid". Occasionally pay the odd forum member with reputation to keep the senseless noobs signing up. Make claims that in order to get paid, they need to "fly under the radar". Just keep banning everyone and not paying. Lots of traffic, free of charge. :2 cents::thumbsup

genius!

:thumbsup

Definitely genius. Thanks a bunch!

When you ban the uploaders you also need a image to replace their images.

DO NOT have a replacement that says removed for copywrite (sic) violation. Have one that says the image was deleted by the uploader with your url very prominent as an advert.

You can take a Barefootsies route and spam the shit out of GFY by starting threads with pics bearing a big watermark identifying your up and coming image host.

most people just starting posting urls to forums with it, most people catch on and start using it.

thats how imgur.com was started.

but i hope you have some decent bandwidth.

Very nice.. What software are you using for your site?

I was using a TinyPic clone but as of now the site is down and I am looking for a new script. The website was hacked and defaced last night by a ".dr.timor" and after posting the website on HackForums.net for help finding out how he did it, many users pointed out additional exploits (a few SQLi vulnerabilities and the ability upload shells). The guy's got a pretty good track record:
http://mirror.sec-t.net/hacker/?s=1&user=dr.timor

Any recommendations for a new image hosting software?

guy that runs imgur.com just breaks even in the interview he did, hes still in college, hes only doing it for fun, not bad for an alexa rank of under 200