Both 4chan and Reddit have started to “button up,” as the New York Times puts it, after this months string of celebrity photo leaks.
Reddit recently took down the “The Fappening” subreddit, but not before making a gigantic amount of money from the traffic that was generated via the photo leaks.
John Menese, the person who created the subreddit, said that the site only took it down after it made a great deal of money. He said that in the six days that it was up, Reddit earned enough money to power its servers for nearly a month, according to Wired magazine.
The company publicly displays how much it costs to run its servers, while Menese claims he kept track of it.
The phenomenon likely made as much as 250 million pageviews.
“If Reddit had wanted to, they could have banned us on Sunday when our traffic broke their servers,” said Menese. “Instead, they chose to milk a week of publicity and a month of server time in Reddit gold before they stepped in.”
“It’s sad that Reddit already made their money and then made a show of banning the site,” added Menese.
Meanwhile, Reddit CEO Yishan Wong said there won’t be any new policies. “We understand the harm that misusing our site does to the victims of this theft, and we deeply sympathize,” he said. “Having said that, we are unlikely to make changes to our existing site content policies in response to this specific event.”
On top of that, 4chan, some of the photos were initially posted, said it would use a DMCA take-down request policy.
Kate Upton, one of the celebrities who allegedly had photos leaked, recently attempted to remove the pictures from Google search results. Google apparently refused to do so.
According to a report from Torrent Freak on Friday, “Her boyfriend Jason Verlander instructed his lawyers to send a DMCA takedown request. Interestingly, Google has rejected nearly half of the links in the Detroit Tigers pitcher’s copyright complaint.”
It added: “While browsing through the reported URLs we also noticed another trend. Some sites have replaced Upton’s leaked photos with photos of other random naked women. Google’s takedown team apparently has a sharp eye because these were not removed by Google either.”
