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.
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.
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.
21 Dec 2022 - 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.
7 May 2022 - Reddit
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.
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.
30 Nov 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.
1 Dec 2024 - Word to the Wise
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.
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.
27 Jan 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.
9 Nov 2023 - W3C
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