by iakul

Created on: February 22, 2009

I am sure most of us are already familiar with image hosting sites like Flickr and Photobucket. The thing that sets Shareapic.net apart from other image hosting sites though, is that you get paid for views on your pictures.

At Shareapic, you earn *$1.00 USD every 4500 views that your pictures generate and payment is made via Paypal when your balance has reached $20 USD. Best of all, they also offer members unlimited uploads. Yes, unlimited uploads with no limit on storage space. Another nice bonus is that you also get a 10% cut of whatever your referral makes if you refer someone to the site. But. And, yes, there is a but. Or in this case, several buts.

First of all, signing up is a tedious process of clicking through "offers" for subscribing to various newsletters and magazines. However, since most of you will likely be signing up only once, that could probably be considered just a minor nuisance.

Next on the "but" list is that Shareapic doesn't allow you to directly embed images hosted there. The best you can do is create a thumbnail of that image(which links to the original image on Shareapic). It would be more accurate to say that Shareapic is an image storage site, rather than an image hosting site. This would be the main reason I am still using other free non-paying image hosting sites, instead of Shareapic. I find Shareapic useful only for storing my pictures and so far the only instance where I have found a use for Shareapic's "image hosting" function was when I wanted to include a pic in a forum signature.

Another "but" would be that Shareapic has a policy of pro-rating their payment. Although they have stated that the reason for this is because they *get paid less for Asian and Indian traffic, due to users being unable to check what percentage of their traffic actually come from Asia and India, it has led to a number of disgruntled users(and ex-users) who are calling it a scam. However, as far as I can tell from my findings, Shareapic is legit.

Still, given all the "buts", I can see that there could be people out there for whom Shareapic could be ideal. Namely, people who just want a place to store their photos, and people who by choice or necessity, are already using image thumbnails rather than embedding the image itself. Otherwise, I really wouldn't recommend dropping your current image hosting site for Shareapic.

* Rates are correct as of Feb 20th 09"
* I'm aware that India is part of Asia, however, I have no idea where Shareapic thinks India is.

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