I have some thoughts for you as someone who's done this before. I used to run a file hosting site called MediaCrush with a buddy of mine. It was moderately successful, but we ended up shutting it down. I later switched to a file host called pomf.se, which eventually was shut down as well. I wrote a blog post that sums up my thoughts on public file hosting: On the profitability of image hosting websites - https://drew…
1. contributing your own bandwidth to the images you upload
2. contribute your own bandwidth to the images you look at.
If you look at an image, maybe you should be required to seed it twice over. If you upload your image, maybe you have to seed it at least 10 times for it to stay up past a certain deadline.As a user of image websites and, well, websites in general, I'd gladly contribute my bandwidth to help the services run. Or even act as a mirror rather than a shared peer.
What do you think about that? It could lessen the load on the image host and help scale things. I just can't seen this happening if you embed an image directly unless you embed iframes or require users to go to the site itself.