Summary
The advice overwhelmingly favors hosting images for affiliate programs on your own servers or utilizing a CDN. This approach grants greater control over critical aspects such as branding consistency, SEO performance, legal compliance, user experience, and data tracking. Allowing affiliates to host images introduces substantial risks, including potential damage to your domain reputation due to spamming, inconsistent branding, misuse of assets, cross-domain complications, exposure to legal liabilities, and security vulnerabilities. CDNs are recommended to improve page load speeds, reduce bandwidth consumption, and secure image assets. Furthermore, employing image optimization techniques and content security policies are crucial for enhancing both website performance and security. It's also highlighted the importance of cautiously managing affiliates, as even a single instance of poor practice can cause damage. Thus, brands should implement strict guidelines and oversight to safeguard their interests.
Key findings
- Reputation at Risk: Affiliate spamming can negatively impact your domain reputation.
- Brand Consistency: Hosting images assures consistent branding and prevents misuse.
- SEO Benefits: Hosting facilitates image optimization, preventing broken links.
- Tracking Control: You can better monitor image usage and affiliate engagement.
- Legal Shield: Hosting images helps control image rights and licensing.
- Security: It allows the use of CDN's to restrict access and prevent hotlinking.
- Performance: CDN use provides performance, page load and bandwidth improvements.
Key considerations
- Affiliate Management: Careful oversight is crucial, as one bad actor can cause significant problems.
- CDN Features: Careful CDN selection is required to consider geographical distribution, security and cost.
- CDN Cost: Cost considerations are important around balancing bandwidth and storage requirements.
- Security Policy: Security policies need to consider trusted image sources to prevent exploits.
- Hosting Option: The hosting option (Own server, CDN etc) need to be considered on factors such as cost and control of image assets.
- Legal: Ensure all affiliates have proper permissions to use your images and are aware of applicable copyright laws.
What email marketers say
11 marketer opinions
The consensus leans towards hosting images for affiliate programs on your own servers or using a CDN. This provides greater control over branding, SEO, image rights, user experience, and tracking. Allowing affiliates to host images introduces risks of domain reputation damage, inconsistent branding, potential misuse, cross-domain issues, and legal complications. While minimizing different domains is recommended, ensuring the reputation of any domain hosting your images is crucial. CDN use helps with performance and minimizing bandwidth issues.
Key opinions
- Reputation Risk: Affiliate spamming can damage your domain's reputation, even if they use their own domains.
- Branding Control: Hosting images ensures consistent branding and prevents the use of low-quality or inappropriate content.
- SEO Benefits: Hosting images allows for optimized SEO practices, such as preventing broken links and ensuring consistent image optimization.
- Tracking & Analytics: Hosting images enables better tracking of image usage, performance, and affiliate engagement.
- Legal Compliance: Hosting images helps maintain control over image rights and licensing, ensuring compliance with copyright laws.
- Cross-Domain Issues: Hosting images on your server can avoid cross-domain issues with cookies and tracking, simplifying analytics.
- CDN Performance: Utilizing a CDN for image hosting improves page load speeds and reduces bandwidth issues.
Key considerations
- Trust: Exercise caution when trusting affiliates, as even one bad actor can cause significant problems.
- Domain Reputation: Prioritize monitoring and maintaining the reputation of any domain (including your own) hosting your images.
- Legal Agreements: Ensure all affiliates have proper permissions to use your images and are aware of applicable copyright laws.
- Image Optimization: Optimize images for web performance to improve user experience and page load times.
- Content Security: Consider implementing Content Security Policy (CSP) to mitigate cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks and ensure only trusted sources can load images.
- Cost and Performance: Weigh the costs of self-hosting versus using a CDN, considering bandwidth and storage needs.
Marketer view
Email marketer from Marketing Over Coffee Podcast explains that hotlinking can cause issues around excess bandwidth costs. They explain you can also lose control of image availability and presentation.
5 Jan 2023 - Marketing Over Coffee
Marketer view
Email marketer from Reddit user u/marketing_pro explains that letting affiliates host images can lead to inconsistencies in branding and potential misuse of your assets. They add that you risk affiliates using low-quality images or associating your brand with inappropriate content, ultimately damaging your reputation.
22 May 2022 - Reddit
What the experts say
3 expert opinions
These expert insights highlight critical risks associated with affiliate image handling. Shared templates increase the potential impact of a single spamming affiliate, leading to template fingerprinting and widespread damage. Lawsuit trolls pose a significant threat to affiliate programs, exploiting CAN-SPAM violations for financial gain. Granting affiliates control over image hosting can expose brands to reputational damage from questionable or spam-related content. Centralized image hosting offers greater quality control and protects brand reputation.
Key opinions
- Shared Template Risk: Using the same email templates across multiple affiliates creates a vulnerability: a single spammer can negatively impact the entire program because the templates get fingerprinted.
- Lawsuit Trolls: Affiliate programs are targets for 'lawsuit trolls' who intentionally trigger CAN-SPAM violations to extract settlements.
- Reputational Damage: Affiliates hosting images introduces the risk of reputational damage due to association with inappropriate or spam content.
Key considerations
- Template Control: Carefully manage email templates used by affiliates to minimize spam risks and ensure compliance.
- Legal Vulnerability: Proactively address potential CAN-SPAM violations and have a legal strategy in place to deal with lawsuit threats.
- Brand Protection: Maintain strict control over image content and hosting to protect brand reputation and ensure quality.
- Hosting control: Control over the hosting to maintain the quality and protect brand reputation.
Expert view
Expert from Email Geeks explains that if affiliates are using the same templates, one affiliate spamming has the opportunity to hurt all your affiliates as the templates themselves will be fingerprinted and identified as spam.
15 Dec 2022 - Email Geeks
Expert view
Expert from Word to the Wise explains that allowing affiliates to host images could damage your reputation if they are associated with questionable content or spam. Therefore, hosting the images gives the original brand control over the quality and appropriateness of the images used.
16 Dec 2024 - Word to the Wise
What the documentation says
5 technical articles
These documentation excerpts strongly advocate for using CDNs and image optimization techniques to improve website performance and security. CDNs enhance image delivery speed, reduce bandwidth usage, and provide security features like signed URLs and cookies to prevent unauthorized access. Optimizing images through proper formatting, compression, and responsive design minimizes page load times and improves user experience. Implementing Content Security Policy (CSP) further reduces the risk of cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. These measures enhance both the performance and security of serving images, making it an essential consideration for affiliate programs.
Key findings
- CDN Performance: CDNs improve image delivery speed by serving images from geographically closer servers, enhancing website speed.
- CDN Security: CDNs provide security features, such as signed URLs and cookies, to prevent unauthorized image access and hotlinking.
- Image Optimization: Optimizing images through proper formatting and compression reduces file size and improves page load times.
- CSP Security: Content Security Policy (CSP) mitigates the risk of cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks when serving images.
Key considerations
- CDN Selection: Choose a CDN based on features like global coverage, security options, and integration with your existing infrastructure.
- Image Format: Select the appropriate image format (JPEG, PNG, WebP, etc.) based on image complexity and compression needs to balance image quality and file size.
- Compression Techniques: Use appropriate compression techniques to reduce image file size without sacrificing image quality.
- Responsive Design: Implement responsive design principles to ensure images are properly sized and displayed on different devices.
- Security Policy: Properly configure and enforce Content Security Policy (CSP) to restrict image sources and prevent XSS attacks.
Technical article
Documentation from Amazon AWS explains that using a CDN, such as Amazon CloudFront, to host images can improve performance and security. It details how using signed URLs or cookies can restrict access to your images, preventing unauthorized use and hotlinking, if you want to protect your image assets.
11 Feb 2025 - Amazon AWS
Technical article
Documentation from W3C outlines the best practices for using different image formats (JPEG, PNG, WebP, etc.) to optimize web performance. They offer guidance on choosing the right format based on image complexity and compression needs, to balance image quality and file size for faster loading times.
24 Nov 2023 - W3C
Are image-based emails a good practice, and what are the deliverability and accessibility implications?
Are image-only emails bad for deliverability?
Can images in emails cause them to go to spam?
Do images in email and PDF attachments affect email deliverability?
Do images in emails affect deliverability?
Does hosting images locally on an ESP CMS improve email deliverability compared to external hosting like AWS?
