It's easy to find them. I need a lesson. My question is, "what's the catch?" Or maybe more politely, "what's their angle?"

I want to embed images into web designs. They call it "hotlinking" but it's called hyperlinking everywhere else, I think.

These sites sell ads. For a web designer, what does that mean? My web page won't finish loading, until the visitor dismisses a popup? I must include an ad banner on my site?

And next, how do they mangle URLs to images? I'm unclear on that.

Recommendations on good, free, no-nonsense, no-ads image hosts allowing hyperlinks are good. Otherwise I need to know how these operations do things in order to decide whether to use them at all. They probably vary a lot, but I'm after general average behaviors.

flickr.com and imageshack.us are the best.

Great; now tell me

(a) How do they make money?
(b) How does their money making affect my web design/visitor experience, if at all, versus normal self-hosted images from my own server?

That's all I really want to know, in a nutshell. GMail mines your emails to sell targeted ads. I understand that business and why the GMail is therefore free. How do the image hosts make their money?

They get a lot of their money from the ads, since so many people use free image hosts like Tinypic.com

Flickr.com gets money in from premium accounts.
the rest does it with adverts on their site. Seems to bring in enough revenue to support the infrastructure!

So Flickr.com or ImageShack.us impose zero net effect on my visitor's experience?

usually yes, unless they continually email their users, I use a place called hedidit.net, I have a GB of space and I don't ever get a single mail...

So Flickr.com or ImageShack.us impose zero net effect on my visitor's experience?

They get millions of visitors a day, and there ad revenue is huge.

usually yes, unless they continually email their users, I use a place called hedidit.net, I have a GB of space and I don't ever get a single mail...

I appreciate the answers. They leave me feeling uneasy. I want to know the rest of the story here. Just saying "they're good" isn't good enough for me.

Example, ImageShack.us is a very good recommendation. However, *even they* have played games with direct hyperlinks as recently as mid-2008, when they hid them, as reported on Wikipedia. Now ImageShack is huge, a top Alexis site, and presumably can generate enough ad revenue - but again, *even they* tried playing games with users.

And lots of these sites don't even allow direct hyperlinks.

The ones that do, like ImageShack, apparently give you "one-shot" to get a direct link, then require re-registration to get it again. I'm not clear how all that works and would just assume avoid it.

So there are all kinds of games going on. ImageShack reverted to user freedom, yay, but I'm interested to know what these games are, exactly, and how to avoid them.

Great; now tell me

(a) How do they make money?
(b) How does their money making affect my web design/visitor experience, if at all, versus normal self-hosted images from my own server?

That's all I really want to know, in a nutshell. GMail mines your emails to sell targeted ads. I understand that business and why the GMail is therefore free. How do the image hosts make their money?
A) Ads or "premium upgrades" for more bandwidth etc; sometimes they have caps
b) If you use imageshack, they did try to play games for a while as mentioned, I noticed them putting little ads under the images if you copied the "forum link" and didn't modify the little code snippet yourself. The speed might also differ, because these image hosts have thousands of requests to serve.

Right now, imageshack and flickr allow hotlinking with virtually no 'games' or penalties.
I've hosted images for my blog there plenty of times and never had any problems.

But imageshack has like a 300MB limit per day transfer i think,..

If you get flickr pro you dont have ANY limitations.