Pinterest servers come here with browsers installed in them so they look & act like normal human visitors. But instead, they feed the pictures here directly off my servers for people to view at pinterest. Instead of storing & serving the pictures on their servers, they're using their servers as a browser & proxy to serve many of the pictures directly from the website that they're hitting.
And they're constantly spidering the sites so they know exactly what we have so they can come & grab whatever they want when they need it.
Let's say it's a 43kb picture we have at a gallery. They don't always just download it to their servers for their users to view, they serve it directly through their fake browser on a visit here to their visitors. Draining 43kb off my servers may not seem like much, but if they did it with over 100 of the images I'm serving, that's 4.3mb they drained from a server that I'm paying a lot of money every month for. If they had 1,000 people a day clicking on those images, that's a 4.3gb daily drain on our servers & bandwidth. In a month, I've distributed 129gb of bandwidth from my servers to pinterest out of my pocket for this mega-corporation's profit, but don't get 1 cent for it, & it doesn't even turn our hit counter.
Unless a site is on a free server with limited bandwidth & traffic restrictions, paid for with lots of clicks on malicious ads, websites pay for a server or host to carry their site, & pay for the bandwidth they expect to use. The size of their server, it's resources, & bandwidth is paid for by what we use or expect to need. When we have people or big corporations stealing our resources & bandwidth, we have to pay for bigger servers, & more bandwidth or suffer crashes, poor performance, or restrict our visitors to carry places like pinterest who feed our material from our servers through their faked browsers to their sites.
This used to be a trick of Russian mobsters, but now pinterest, facebook, twitter, & many others do it. It's killing small business online, small sites, & independently operated sites. The bad part is nobody does anything about it because nobody wants the small business, small site, or independent sites to survive anyway. Almost half our server costs goes to these big corporate leachers & criminals using our bandwidth & resources without our permission. They're making millions or billions of dollars a year. Let them pay for their own bandwidth & servers if they want to display the pictures, don't suck them directly from me & my servers.
Betty's isn't here & paid for to serve them. They have plenty of their own money & servers so shouldn't need ours.