I spend a good amount of time on Twitter, and a lot of links go to websites, videos, and pictures. One of the leading services that lets Twitter users upload pictures is TwitPic. TwitPic was one of the very first companies to let Twitter users enable photo sharing, and due to the amount of traffic and traction TwitPic was getting, their servers couldn’t handle the load. From that point, many other services have come out, and it looks like yFrog is now leading the pack.
Hosting can be expensive — I know. But do you really have to take it this far, TwitPic? Upon looking at TechCrunch Developer Andy Brett’s photo hosted on TwitPic of Michael’s dog, Laguna, I was unpleasantly surprised with a huge overlay ad of Second Life. The whole point of Twitpic is to see pictures posted by people you (kinda) know. Blocking those pictures with a gigantic overlay ad showing avatars of people you don’t know is counterproductive.
Hopefully with all the money TwitPic is getting from these ads, they can fix their hosting problems. Otherwise, people will start to think twice about clicking on those Twitpic links.
Wow its a shame to see such a great service drop so low. I can understand the need to pay the bills, but if I have to see one of those every time i visit their site, I might go insane.
Just use something else.
Posting pictures to Twitter is a feature many other services offer. Many of these services have other features, too.
Oh no. An overlay ad, on a site run by one guy with some massive bandwidth and storage bills.
This coming from a well-paid TechCrunch writer, with 20 (count them!) ads on his very post.
You, sir, are correct.
Thank you! What a terrible article. Just misleading, ignorant and totally lacking in self-awareness.
Couldn’t agree more. Maybe the author would like to pay a fee to have an ad-free experience? Didn’t think so.
everyone needs ad $$$…techcrunch adds a new ad area almost daily…
What ads?
Agreed.
That Daniel Brusilovsky dude is plain Ignorant.
Forget about ALL THE ADS on Techcrunch
This idiot should know that if he leaves his mouse over the ad in the right-side on TwitPic, it will open an overlay after 3 seconds.
Dude writes tech stuff and jumps on something like that so quick without checking why it happened?
Maybe you need to read what your boss Mike wrote in 2005. http://www.tech...eoegg-launches/
Or maybe you need this link
http://www.crun.../videoegg/posts
Go learn a thing or two, then come back & post
do you know what an alternative is? i have never even visited twitpic and i sure as fuck dont plan to
Every1 needs money.. not to pay the hosting bills but more than that.. to make an sustainable income from it…
So blaming twitpic might not be the right idea.. even at TC we have several ads, not the overlay ads but that’s acceptable as well.
Oh, give him a break.
He runs that site by himself, he needs to make money somehow. By the way, that ad is Videoegg and if you didn’t hover over the ad and wait for 3 seconds, that wouldn’t have popped up.
just tried it out, you are right. This is a deceptive post from TC.
I tried it too. This post implies that you are received with this ad as soon as the page loads.
You can use AdBlockPlus for this specific site because they have no other options to monetize.
Hey, at least Evony hasn’t discovered flash ads yet.
I agree! How far will they go? It’s ridiculous. I love twitter.But I dont want to have to look at this every daggon time I go there.
I just hope they come to their sences and stop the twitpic.
I just tweeted on “Chinese Twitter” and I’m already hungry for another post
You do realize that TwitPic may not have entire control over what ads are shown on the site, right? This happens all the time on other sites and they can take them off the ad roll most likely. MacRumors has often had banner ads that go out of the normal thin banner and expand to half the browser window.
It’s not TwitPic who is “taking it this far,” but VideoEgg, their ad network.
It’s just more failed “reporting” from Daniel. It’s easier to just ignore everything he writes.
I’ve often wondered if TwitPic is strategically adding a delay to the loading and display of the ads above the “More photos by …” section to get more clicks. I’ve found myself unintentionally clicking on an advertisement rather then the next photo in the album just as the ad is loaded. Notice how the loading of an ad pushes the “More photos by …” section down and replaces it with an ad, which is precisely where my mouse ends up often times.
Firefox, Adblock. You’ll never see the ads.
Even still, I’ve stopped using Twitpic. It lacks too many features. Don’t get me wrong, I love it’s simplicity over other photo sharing sites [Tweet Photo looks like quite the pile of clutter], there are certain things that aren’t possible, eg: editing a photo caption, deleting a previously posted comment on someone else’s photo, etc.
Comonn Twitpic…
It’s not people avoiding clicking on twitpic links they need to worry about it’s people not posting them at all.
If, say, Ashton posts a link to twitpic his followers are likely going to click it because there’s no other outlet for them to get the content.
I’m gonna go ahead and be redundant here and say what Amit said before. If you’re not using AdBlock+, then you only have yourself to blame for ads like that. After almost a year with ABP, I am now pretty much unable to bring myself to browse the Internet without it — largely due to ads like that one.
I find it hilarious that techcrunch is complaining about ads considering they have:
728×90 adsense banner up top
250×250 adsense banner by actively discussed posts
12 125×125 ad boxes
Advertisement for a techcrunch report
2 adsense skyscrapers
4 125×50 ad boxes
and some people might count the job board ads in that list too
So really, techcrunch should be the last site to complain about ads
Is there a story in here I missed?
+2 for Irony. Thank god for double-tap in the text column on iphone, which moves most of the ads out of the way pronto.
You forgot the cardboard ad placed in the TC office for the crunchcam…
ok, I am not against ads..Everyone needs to make money..
Sort of sick and tired that TechCrunch allows for articles of this caliber that are not only insignificant, but poorly researched.
Users have the choice to click on the ads. It’s not like you hit the landing page and get an ad overlaying the screen.
Yfrog is definitely not the answer, they just have a boat load of money to push their poorly designed photo sharing service. Twitgoo, Pikchur and img.ly are by far superior. What a joke
tc giving videoegg expanding vid banners on twitpic some smack-down. ooh the fun just never stops here in techville.
hey has anyone signed up for a second life account from that ad?
It takes 3 seconds of your mouse sitting over the ad for it even to pop up…
“I spend a good amount of time on Twitter”
Nuff said. You are not worth reading.
actually tweetphoto is the one to watch here and blowing past yfrog
http://www.alex.../tweetphoto.com
Umm Daniel, a little lesson my young friend. How about a correction stating you were too blind to see you left your mouse over an ad for 3 seconds which caused the pop up, it isnt automatic. So next time you get ticked off at something try recreating the problem again instead of jumping on a well read blog and rambling on about something that was your fault to begin with. I realize you are still in HS but I think that’s journalism 101…
VideoEgg ads don’t activate themselves, if your mouse hovers over a VideoEgg it starts a count to 3, after 3 seconds, the full screen ad display pops up. Just watch where you place your cursor. Problem solved.
I never get annoyed by such minor things #adblockplus. also I pay for my flickr account. I pay for the bus. and ad-based services are paid by…well, you know the answer.
That was one stupid post.
Michael you might want to get your writers up to speed with how online advertising works.
These ads are from Videoegg and they are CPE ads. CPE (cost per engagement), so the user has to hover their mouse over the ad for more than 3 seconds to see the overlay ad.
These types of ads dont open automatically, they are user initiated.
Daniel you really should research this before you write a post about it!
Before you criticize others, have your own house in order. Start by spell-checking your TC bio.
Out of the past 2 million pics Twicsy has indexed (roughly 10 days worth), about 1.8m of them have been Twitpics, and about 100k of them have been yFrog pics. Twitpic is still the Twitter picture leader by a massive margin.
This is terrible, slandering TwitPic and VideoEgg like this. Both are brilliant services and it was all down to you that the advert popped up in the first place. You seriously need to research before posting things like this in the future. TechCrunch can have a massive affect on websites and if you’re essentially spreading lies about websites those websites will suffer.
Don’t be so naive when using websites, like people said before you left your mouse over the advert for 3 seconds and if you’re so blind as you miss the countdown process it plays before it even pops up then that’s your problem.
This is another example of an over privileged kid getting too big for his boots.
At least he has figured out a way to monetize Twitter. He has been making more money than them for the past year.
You could just use http://www.QpixL.com No ads and full circle feedback. Kinda TwitPic with a purpose. Plus it supports Twitter and FB for sharing pics.
Garbage article. As everyone else has already pointed out.
somebodies getting fired…:/
+1 to everybody else criticizing the author.
The CTR on TwitPics ads are probably something along the lines of 0.20% at best, the majority of people who click ads are less-than-tech-savvy organic searchers (as I’m sure techcrunch knows) and not regular visitors to a site.
I’d be shocked if TwitPic was breaking even.
Yfrog only loads half the time when I am veiwing my friends stuff. The other half is a over capacity message. Twitpic has never failed to load for me. Maybe it’s just me though.
What a terrible article. The level of journalism at TC has reached a all time low. This article looks like it was written by a 10 year old.
@failblog needs to retweet this
That was not suppose to be a reply? Haha sorry. I don’t know what happened.
Well, it kinda was.
That’s why I use http://hur.ly/ Minimal ads, short domain….etc…