One addition I would add would be to actually link to the service or their status page. If you are going to call them out if their service is down, at least give them something in return, i.e. discovery.
It's becoming more of an issue now that we are growing.
We have had conversations with the YouTube guys about this and they have asked us to use API's instead of directly scrapping pages.
Quora is currently rate limiting us a ton as well. We again have to directly reach out to them.
Most oEmbed endpoints aren't rate limited because they are generally not resource intensive. They are also meant to be used client side and therefore expect more traffic.
Embedly also does a fair amount of caching that reduces the number of calls that we have to make. This limits us, because we aren't a straight pass through, but helps us handle spikes of traffic.
We all need to give hat tips to the people that inspired us to be greater and try new things. We would not be here right now without Fred. I'll put his name in titles all day long just to adknowledge his contributions.
api.embed.ly will remain free, but it is a community resource. If someone is abusing it we will ask them to move over to Pro as to not effect the other users. We have not had to ask anyone to move over and don't see it happening in the near future.
Interesting, I guess we are doing it wrong. I see what you are saying about skimlinks, we have received this advice in the past. It's just not something we are looking into now.
We might be up for a commission based remote worker. :)
Have you ever tried to make money on affilate links? In all honesty we make next to nothing from affiliating Amazon links. It's not even close to a viable business, we only do it because we don't like leaving money on the table.
I see where you are coming from. Our thinking was that RSS was not designed to create an embed from a url, but for feed syndication in a standard format. This is definitely "repurposing" a standard format into an oEmbed type response for embedding.
Twitter seems to be having search issues with OR statements and filters. They are only returning a limited amount of results. I'll update when it's worked out.
We were profitable and growing.
Good comment though.