Apollo and ImageReward

Apollo, Adobe’s platform for Rich Internet Applications, will enter public alpha in the next few hours. Developers will no doubt be familiar with the name, since Adobe has generated some interest in the developer community for its ability to create rich apps for the desktop environment. It’s essentially a way to bring the web to the desktop - Ryan Stewart heralded the news of the launch today.

Hosting millions of images is expensive enough for the likes of Photobucket and ImageShack, but how about actually paying users for hosting images with you? Newcomer ImageReward wants to do exactly that - host your images for MySpace, Piczo and the rest, and pay you for the privilege (yup, it’s new, despite what the footer may say).

The site rewards users with points: 2 points every time someone views your image, and 20 points when you refer new users. These points can then be converted to cash. The crucial part: I can’t find how much money you get paid. Most likely, those points convert to $0.000001 or less. The other massive issue is that some of the images hosted here are clearly copyrighted - yup, they’ll pay you to infringe copyrights. Why not sue us now and get it over with?

This is the same problem that the likes of Metacafe have to look out for as payments are added to online video: paying users for copyrighted content they didn’t create is surely far more objectionable than just hosting it. There is, however, a great opportunity to combine image hosting and a payback for the content creator: I’m sure Photobucket will figure it out in time.