Should I host images for affiliate partners or let them host the images?

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.

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.

Email marketer from LinkedIn User Sarah Johnson states that maintaining a consistent user experience across all channels, including affiliate marketing, is crucial for brand identity. She suggests hosting images yourself to ensure that all visuals align with your brand guidelines and provide a seamless experience for customers.

Email marketer from Ignite Visibility responds suggesting using a CDN to host the images. This helps to improve the page load speeds and reduce the bandwidth issues.

Email marketer from Stackoverflow User Image_Pro explains that hosting images yourself gives you more control over image rights and licensing. They advise ensuring that your affiliates have the proper permissions to use the images and that you are complying with all applicable copyright laws.

Email marketer from Quora User Jane Smith suggests hosting images on your own server to better track image usage and performance. They note that this allows you to gather valuable analytics data, such as which images are most popular and which affiliates are generating the most engagement.

Email marketer from Digital Point forum user Webmaster123 shares that hosting images on your server can avoid cross-domain issues with cookies and tracking. This can simplify analytics and ensure accurate attribution of conversions.

Marketer from Email Geeks explains that hosting images should not be a big issue but recommends minimizing different domains in content to reduce risks. He also notes the importance of ensuring that any domains where partners host images have a good reputation, citing a case where a sender's images were flagged as malicious due to being hosted on a poorly managed image sharing service.

Email marketer from Neil Patel's Blog suggests hosting images on your own server to maintain control over SEO and branding. He explains that you can ensure consistent image optimization and prevent broken links, which could negatively affect your website's ranking. When affiliates host images, quality control is lost.

Marketer from Email Geeks states that if an affiliate spams, it will likely hurt your domain reputation. Even if the affiliate uses their own domain, the reputation damage will find its way back to your domain eventually.

Marketer from Email Geeks advises not to trust affiliates completely, stating that even though most are fine, it only takes one bad apple to cause issues.

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.

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.

Expert from Email Geeks shares a story about lawsuit trolls who target poorly run affiliate email programs. These trolls create email accounts, wait for affiliate emails, and then threaten lawsuits for CAN-SPAM violations, often leading to settlements.

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.

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.

Documentation from Mozilla Developer Network explains the importance of Content Security Policy (CSP) when serving images. They suggest that a proper CSP helps mitigate the risks of cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks and ensures that only trusted sources can load images on your website, enhancing security.

Documentation from Cloudflare explains that CDNs can automatically optimize images by reducing file size, converting to modern formats like WebP, and serving images from geographically closer servers. They add that this improves website speed and user experience.

Documentation from Google Web Developers explains the importance of optimizing images for web performance. They share information about using appropriate image formats, compression techniques, and responsive images to reduce page load times and improve user experience. This helps to improve the image quality without increasing bandwidth.