Hey Everyone, new to the forum but after some forum research you seem like the best place to start
My appologies for the wall of text and tl;dr factor, it's too a complex issue to cover in a couple of lines.
We have a somewhat unique and bizarre problem that maybe you can help me with. Lets start by saying that I run a fairly serious internet tech company (no, we're not selling anything) and we're not really interested in the adult market at all (but we're certainly not naïve). We have a lot of random side projects, and some of them develop into possible marketable ideas, some are just fun, and some just wander off and die in the corner. OK! So brief background done, onto the point why I'm here.
One of our side projects was a semi-intelligent (very polite) AI bot which half-decided to be a web crawler (we specialise in experimental high performance computing and massive datasets) which trundled off and indexed parts of the web without much oversight. We obviously didn't really think this through, as a massive percentage of the internet is porn. To cut a long story short, it basically downloaded some 90million large images and indexed them, some 10% were adult/porn. We've since stopped it.
Of these 10%, about 3.5 million are from known/trusted/verifiable websites (ie: not untagged images on Imgur or other possible dodgy sources, had proper adult tags) and most of them are grouped into sets / galleries.
I suppose you could consider this a cached index of free galleries. Not being a adult company and not being bastards (we're obviously not going to resell this, we're not thieves) we've not really done anything at all with it. We made a very quick TGP style gallery, but quite frankly the number of images is pretty staggering, along with a little play (smartphone) mobile site.
Before you all shout about how we're heathenous people no better than the tube* site, the example gallery is completely non-profit (no ads or banners at all), we're paying personally for the bandwidth out of pocket, and each sample gallery on the site has a direct non-affiliated link back to where it came from, so we're giving back to the industry for free at the moment, and hopefully they see that (we've had no complaints). We've generated about 106,000 clicks off our site to the original sources since launch a few months ago, this sounds pretty good from what I've seen of the industry stats.
We completely ignored the project since setting it up and with no marketing what so ever it gets about a million page views a quarter (300kish a month), which translates into about 2mbit of bandwidth (nothing to our current network, really). The mobile site gets a couple of hundred hits, effectively zero from a business perspective.
So, basically, we have some project that could be interesting, we have no idea what the industry thinks about it (why we're asking here) - if there's a general outcry we'll probably just kill it as we don't need the hassle.
It's almost certainly the largest private collection of adult images in clean categorisations on the internet from what we can see, it totals about 280GB of raw images.
In fact, we have so much porn we can do completely insane stuff like this (not that you need it here, but WARNING, PORN, NSFW etc.):
http://i.imgur.com/8LKRO.jpg and
http://i.imgur.com/rx4Zb.jpg
These are massively low res cutups, the originals are about 80mb and are some 10000px wide, yes each of those little squares is a different porn image.
Some stats for the nerdy / webmaster people on here:
- about 3.5 million categorised images, in about 35 categories
- if you looked at each image as your day job (one image every 5 seconds, 9-5, working week) it would take you 2.4 years to see each one
- they're all progressive 80% quality JPEGs, with thumbnails, web optimised
- total size is about 280GB
- we have the following reference data in an index: images, image size, R/G/B index, overall gallery quality, gallery category, gallery source domain and URL, and some other stuff in a RDBMS schema
- absolutely none, 0%, of the images are from members areas (only free areas are crawled, for obvious reasons), so providing you're not evil it should be usable
- The test domain/gallery site has 160k fully Google indexed URLs, and has Google sitelinks
- Approximately 300,000 galleries, about 11-12 images per gallery
So basically, any ideas what to do with this? I assume it has a market value to someone and I assume we can sell the index/database index of images as a cache similar to what a search engine has, does this have any market value to you lot? Would we be eviscerated for trying? We're most certainly not after pissing anyone off, quite frankly. Anyone that has this would most certainly be a significant player in the gallery/mobile space.
All comments welcome! This might appear on some other adult webmaster forums as well
Hi! After some advice/ideas
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