Comment by conartist6

Also get ye some trademarks. Make sure your logo and branding colors are trademarked in combination with the name Photopea. Use the logo and branding colors more places.

It won't stop AI thieves cold, but now they'll be in violation of two kinds of law unless they do a bunch more work to rip out all the trademarked branding.

Finally, move beyond ads as your business model.

An ad blocker removes the ads from your website, and still leaves you paying to host the traffic. In a way it's worse for you than what unauthorized mirrors are doing. You're seeing that there's unmet demand for what you are offering, so my advice is: figure out how to capture that demand. Why aren't those people taking the deals you're offering them?

I took the liberty of disabling my own ad blocker to do a little research and HOLY COW THESE ARE BAD ADS.

Let's lay out the problems:

- Something is horribly mangled in the ad loading code. The ads flash in and out of existence, and cycle through at breakneck speed, ~5 seconds per ad. Between the flashing in and out and the flashing different ads, it is not possible to do serious work with this going on.

- Many of the people who don't have a photo editor on their device are using touchscreen devices. Many of those people are right handed. For them the actual photo editing tools would be largely impossible to use without accidentally clicking a giant ad which takes up the whole right side of the screen, at which point they would no longer be able to edit photos. Once this happens to you 5 times or so I imagine you start to get very angry.

- Because the ad doesn't fit into the UI at all, you're wasting huge amounts of the screen and impacting productivity proportionately.

So I guess my final advice is: if you don't respect your users, I don't know why you would expect them to respect you. Offer a better deal and more people will take it.