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Zippyshare quits after 17 years, 45M visits per month makes no money

immdischt 4y ago
Rest in Peace Zippy!
dsfgdfgfdg 4y ago
Already added a working mirror https://dface.online/post/51_file-sharing-site-zippyshare-shutting-down-after-17-years-of-working-file-sharin.html https://dface.online/post/51_file-sharing-site-zippyshare-sh...
dsfgdfgfdg 4y ago
https://zippyshareme.com https://zippyshareme.com
bellBivDinesh 4y ago
So the story is effective ad-blocking killed their business?
- cptskippy 4y ago
  They said visits were in decline and they'd all but abandoned development of the site. It's been in ktlo for a decade.
- nashashmi 4y ago
  Or Adblock called for more obnoxious ads, which caused more Adblocking, which killed the business.
- Pulcinella 4y ago
  Since 2006 we have been on the market in an unchanged form, that is, as ad financed/free file hosting. However, you have been visiting in less and less over the years, as the arguably very simple formula of the services we offer is slowly running out of steam … Over the past year, electricity prices have gone up 2.5 times, which, with a large number of servers, gives a significant increase in costs that we have no way to balance. There are still a bunch of smaller reasons [for closing down], but we could write a book on this, and probably no one would want to read it. Sounds like visits are down and costs are way, way up.
  - whstl 4y ago
    It's no surprise that less and less people are accessing them in the last few years. They have apparently blocked access in Europe. Reports show that it is blocked at least in the UK, Germany and Spain.
- pif 4y ago
  What is sad is that ad-blockers would have never become a necessity, had advertising remained fair (as in: static images, no code execution on browser, no tracking).
  - vkou 4y ago
    If people would just behave well, we wouldn't need laws and courts. When there's a profit motive, someone will always cut corners.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      > When there's a profit motive, someone will always cut corners. This only works as a specialisation of "people". Where there's no profit motive, people will also cut corners.
    - appleiigs 4y ago
      Your comment doesn’t make sense. What profit motive? It drove them to shutdown and people to use ad blockers. The feedback loop is positive: behave well -> profit. Your comment discusses the inverse: behave poorly -> go to jail.
      - vkou 4y ago
        The profit motive in question is the motive to fill your screen with shitty, laggy, possibly dangerous ads. Have you visited your local newspaper's website, or a fandom property, lately? Once enough people do that, the users install adblockers, which also hurts advertisers who were not filling your screen with shitty, laggy, possibly dangerous ads.
    - pif 4y ago
      The problem is, we don't have laws and courts for ads. That's why we are all forced to walk around heavily armed and shoot down whoever gets less than two metres apart from us!
redrix 4y ago
Shame to see another relic of the internet-past shutting down. I used to use ZippyShare a fair bit to demo the DLP capabilities of a past employer.
thyrox 4y ago
So basically ad blockers? For all the evil ads are, they do keep a lot of such small businesses running too. Now that we've reached a point where every person has some form of adblock from abp to brave, I think this we're gonna be seeing more and more of this. P.S. I recently cancelled my Kagi subscription too after their recent price hike and search restrictions. So businesses that don't show ads but charge the user directly are also struggling too it seems. Guess doing business nowadays isn't that easy.
- nashashmi 4y ago
  There is a way out of this. Don’t use third party ad service networks. OTOH, CNN also includes ads that are not JS driven. That is fine but the ads are just terrible quality (lending tree!).
- pif 4y ago
  Ethical ad-blockers exist. Do ethical advertisers exist?
  - abatilo 4y ago
    There's https://www.ethicalads.io/ https://www.ethicalads.io/ if you're only targeting developers
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    Plenty, usually in the form of individual websites selling ad space on their website, just like newspapers sell ads in their paper issues. No user tracking necessary, and if you sell based on time you don't even have to track impressions or clicks. But that doesn't fit the "apply to our whitelist" model of many "ethical" ad-blockers.
    - pif 4y ago
      > No user tracking necessary Have that switched to "No user tracking possible", or better still to "static images only", and no whitelist will refuse them.
  - 4y ago
VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
Reminds me of https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-online-services.html https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli... The only reason imgur survived is because they ruined their UX in search of monetization.
- causi 4y ago
  I recently visited Imgur after a few years away. My god has that site fallen. Doing anything takes two or three times as many clicks, ads are everywhere, and 75% of the posts are left-leaning versions of your uncle's shitty political Facebook posts. "Upvote THIS if you think Trump should be arrested!"
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > "Upvote THIS if you think Trump should be arrested!" Oh boy, wouldn't that be a paradise? A 21st century version of ostracism: if enough people upvote something on social media, they can get you arrested.
    - pjc50 4y ago
      It would be deeply ironic if the man who ran on a campaign of "lock her up" and had huge crowds chanting this at his rallies got locked up.
- Aperocky 4y ago
  But how much longer though?
- dizhn 4y ago
  "I have started a private service called sr.ht, which I aim to use to fix the problem by only letting my friends and I use it. " Had a little chuckle at the end.
ccity88 4y ago
Its quite sad that ad-blocking is framed as killing this business. Surely it's more akin to a subsidised business failing to move to a more sustainable model? Don't get me wrong I love free no nonsense business models, but as Google and Facebook have shown us, ads are only part of the equation. If we didn't collectively lose trust with the ad industry, and ads weren't so intrusive, I for one (and many others I've spoken to) wouldn't be blocking ads. I go out of my way to disable ad-block on friendly websites and blogs that need the ad revenue; sites that have a responsible and ethical policy surrounding their ad usage. Zippyshare seemed like one of those sites. Unfortunately the rest of the industry had to ruin it for them. Even more sad, this will become the norm and sites will have to move to a paid subscription type model to keep their services alive.
- qzx_pierri 4y ago
  I welcome a paid model for all sites, honestly. That way, sites aren't slaves to the ideological driven policies of the advertisers. Post something the advertiser doesn't like? Ads get pulled and the site loses money. When you pay for the service, the site owner can raise their middle finger if anyone outside of the site staff doesn't like content on their site. Sites like YouTube are a perfect example of this. Constant censorship and other nonsense because many of their advertisers are American, and thus 'prude as fuck' (lack of a better term). So content on YouTube has slowly been becoming more and more squeaky clean (advertiser friendly). In a few years, YouTube's content policy will be 1:1 with broadcast television. Fuck reliance on advertisers. Eventually, any monetized content online will need to be squeaky clean and society will move onto another model, which is hopefully a paid model. P.S. The idea that content will only be paid for by the golden 18-24 demographic with disposable income (while excluding others) is a myth. If kids can beg their parents for Fortnite skins every month and get Epic Games up to 5 billion in revenue per year[1], then $4 per month to stream content for a streaming site in the future is very possible 1: https://www.charlieintel.com/how-much-money-has-fortnite-made/218252 https://www.charlieintel.com/how-much-money-has-fortnite-mad...
  - jodrellblank 4y ago
    Then they are slaves to the customers. Post something the customer doesn't like? Customer leaves and the site loses money. Incentive is for the content to become family friendly low detail low effort lowest-common-denominator because that appeals to largest range of potential customers. > "Sites like YouTube are a perfect example of this. Constant censorship and other nonsense because many of their advertisers are American, and thus 'prude as fuck' (lack of a better term). So content on YouTube has slowly been becoming more and more squeaky clean (advertiser friendly)." You think YouTube could skip the advertisers, sell directly to soccer moms, and then have porn adverts and swearing and raise their middle finger, and that would work?
sourcecodeplz 4y ago
Zippy was cool for mp3s, cracks, plugins, books and smaller files. Then dropbox, google drive and many others came that had no ads and larger file size limits BUT with an actual business model: upgrade to pro/plus/premium etc.
runxel 4y ago
RIP, you'll be missed. However I'm not puzzled by this. The speed was always fast, and they didn't employ any strategies like a lot of the other OCH which made downloading a huge PITA.
petodo 4y ago
RIP Zippy, one of the best filehosters with great speed and no noticable limits between downloads at least there is still Uptobox with very reasonable limits on free accounts (30mins between files and 30 seconds wait time + pretty big file size) and Mega (no waiting, but ~5GB per day)
- causi 4y ago
  Conveniently Mega only limits you by IP address, not account. You can just swap VPN locations and keep downloading. 1fichier is also pretty incredible.
  - ErikHuisman 4y ago
    Zippyshare should add limits and advertise for nordvpn to circumvent these limits.
- dapatil 4y ago
  You should try out https://filepost.io https://filepost.io (Disclaimer - I own it) I do feel for zippy though. Even for my site, Ad revenue has completely dried up and infrastructure costs now outweigh my revenue.
  - Fornax96 4y ago
    I run https://pixeldrain.com https://pixeldrain.com. At the start of this year I completely removed all ads from my site. I'm done with checking ad network after ad network only to find out that they all pay the same: pennies. Pixeldrain now runs on subscribers over at Patreon and it's working quite well actually.
jeffbee 4y ago
> Over the past year, electricity prices have gone up 2.5 times I wonder if the people who constantly yell about the obvious superiority of self-hosting over cloud can internalize this information. The costs of hosting your own computers has often increased. Cloud costs, so far, have only gone down. When they launched them 13 years ago, EC2 "micro" instances cost 1.4¢/hr. Today, they are twice as large, much faster, and cost 0.53¢/hr. In real dollars, the instance cost has declined 73%, and more like 95% in specific throughput. Meanwhile colo prices have gone nowhere but up.
- bsder 4y ago
  > The costs of hosting your own computers has often increased. Cloud costs, so far, have only gone down. If that's true, it's only true because cloud pricing was highway robbery to begin with. Hurricane Electric (who I chose simply because they always put their price online--other colos should take note) is at $400/month for a cab & GigE. It doesn't take very many online servers to put that in a rounding error. In roughly 20 months, you win against the cloud even if you count CapEx. And, do remember, the cloud companies all charge egress by the byte. Sure, most people don't care, until they become successful and suddenly wind up with a $10K bill in a month. The "cloud" is useful two ways: 1) Pop up servers quickly However, this is should be "I use servers and can transfer them to another provider quickly if I need to." Any provider should work as well as bare metal. 2) Lean heavily into specific services on in the cloud provider. The goal here is that you are cheaper specifically because you don't have a fixed "baseline" that you are always utilizing. In this way, you are completely relying on the fact that the provider can shuffle things to be uber cheap.
- bsder 4y ago
  I think you are off on your math somewhere or you aren't accounting for something. $0.0053/hr would be roughly $4 per month. Even the uber cheap providers like Hetzner aren't that good.
- jodrellblank 4y ago
  Unless you are suggesting that Amazon is getting free electricity, then must be either: - Profiting enough from micro instances to pay for the electricity of running them. If so then when you get to using a server full of micro instances you can save money by doing that yourself and not paying Amazon's profit. - Eating the loss and subsidising it from other income. This is convenient for you but not anything to do with the cloud, more to do with the power of a huge company. - Big enough to have arm twisted a fixed price for a long time ahead, pushing the extra cost onto the supplier, so the supplier will go bankrupt and be bailed out by the taxpayer. Again convenient for you but nothing to do with the cloud. - Other? What's your explanation for Amazon not charging customers more despite rising energy costs? You switched "self-hosting" to "colo" which aren't the same things. One can imagine a big non-tech company negotiating fixed prices on their power for their datacenters. One can imagine a big non-tech company investing in regular server refreshes to converge down on more power efficient servers over time.
endisneigh 4y ago
I don't understand - is it not possible to construct a site that does not allow you to download if you have an ad-blocker? It seems trivial: 1. Show an ad, include a special value. 2. Download only if special value is present. 3. If special value is not present, tell user they must disable ad-block to download. Most sites fail to do this not because of technical complexity, but because they don't care about ad-blocking and/or it doesn't affect their business greatly. In ZS's case, they should've implemented this. I chalk this up to poor management tbh. Things like the electricity cost increase could have been balanced with more ads to compensate. The kind of things on ZS tend to be nefarious, and the electricity needed would likely be offset by say, a 15 second video being watched before downloading.
- arbuge 4y ago
  There are ways to detect certain kinds of ad blocking but they're not always reliable. The client web browser has no obligation to report back to the server with what it's decided to show the user.
  - Zurrrrr 4y ago
    I used to want to try and make something that would render ads to a virtual dummy screen, so anything that would check for them would show them as being present, but no user would see them.
    - sbarre 4y ago
      Speaking for myself only here (but I suspect I'm not alone), I don't use an ad blocker to primarily block visual ads (although it's a nice side effect). I use an ad blocker to block tracking networks and protect my privacy, and one of the end results of that is that visual ads get blocked. So I can't imagine a scenario where I'd need to fake-render the visual ad, since the ad code never has the chance to get that far.
      - Zurrrrr 4y ago
        The scenario I was thinking of was a final solution to the cat and mouse game of detecting ad blockers. If the site and js checks and thinks the ad is being displayed but it isn't, that's a win.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ckdarby 4y ago
> "Over the past year, electricity prices have gone up 2.5 times, which, with a large number of servers, gives a significant increase in costs that we have no way to balance." They could have reinvested the earnings in the past to run a more cost effective solution to prevent this happening today. I have seen this countless times where companies will just drain the business of cash and leave everything knowing it'll die eventually in the long run. They had options like reducing the max file size, the number of files, the retention period, etc. They hadn't posted a blog outlining any plans or features for ~6 years.
- codetrotter 4y ago
  > reducing the max file size Files are only getting bigger over time. Reducing the max file size will leave even fewer people using the service.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    If 10% of your users impose 90% of costs, without providing a similarly exaggerated share of income... I'd LOVE to fire those customers.
    - dewey 4y ago
      The way these sites usually work is that there‘s a small group of people uploading a lot and distributing these links everywhere (All the piracy boards). That‘s what gets people to your site and in turn ad impressions. Getting rid of your top uploaded will not be beneficial to your bottom line.
      - TylerE 4y ago
        I'm aware. What I'm saying is you want the guy uploading, like, tons of old arcade ROMs or comic book scans or something... not 50GB bluray rips.
- Supermancho 4y ago
  > They could have reinvested the earnings in the past to run a more cost effective solution to prevent this happening today. Do you know this for a fact? Assuming there's some simple obvious solution to a declining long-lived business, is questionable.
cute_boi 4y ago
I love Zippyshare. It didn't use those shenanigans that other file sharing website used :(. I will miss it
anenefan 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35225494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35225494 My comment there, the short version is just over two years ago, various advertisers on there went mad with hard core porn ads. Additionally here I'll add that I dug back into comments around two years ago, I was told some links were also pointing unsuspecting users into malware sites ... so I guess anyone (the average user) who had to use a zippyshare link basically if they were smart, had to use protection. Hard core porn on sites used at work, or something kids would use is ... the epitome of what not to do.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  I assume it's hard to find advertisers willing to pay for space on piracy sites.
  - anenefan 4y ago
    I think but can't be certain, for the longest time zippyshare formed a bridge between forum users to share photos, private collection of info links and notes -- file sizes were generally not large, but not suited for emails. Indispensable really in some forum types to be able sent via private messaging information, charts and pictures. No doubt like everything, the service was used for piracy in the beginning as well ... but it has only been the last few years where I've heard some sites actively using the service to share something that replaced the tv. Advertising can work but as long as it's honest and appropriate to the user base. I think it was Kickass pirate site that went mad for hard porn as well ... I knew it was only a matter of time it would be deemed time for the service to die off, not many people like the idea someone's preteen kid could looking for something, run up on such stuff.
high_byte 4y ago
why close and not sell? with 45m visitors surely someone knows how to monetize it.
korse 4y ago
It isn't just standard ad blockers being used to access Zippyshare. A whole lot of the content is .part files or similar. People share links and run them through specialized downloaders, wget etc. in order to grab all the part files from a link, skipping the ad interface entirely. At one point this was a specialized use case (I think) but I get the feeling that over time this became the norm. As such, I think most of parallels people are making to general ad-block use and the Zippy is based on a bad premise.
manicennui 4y ago
What percentage of the files on Zippyshare were legal?
codetrotter 4y ago
Well. Their main audience was pirates. A group of people that dislike being bothered by intrusive ads, dislike the threats to their privacy that ads pose, and prefers to not pay for access to files because information should be free, or at least prefers to pay as little as possible for access. It’s kind of a wonder that Zippyshare lasted for so long actually. At least they outlived both the original MegaUpload and the original RapidShare. > RapidShare was an online file hosting service that opened in 2002. In 2009, it was among the Internet's 20 most visited websites and claimed to have 10 petabytes of files uploaded by users with the ability to handle up to three million users simultaneously. Following the takedown of similar service Megaupload in 2012, RapidShare changed its business model to deter the use of its services for distribution of files to large numbers of anonymous users and to focus on personal subscription-only cloud-based file storage. Its popularity fell sharply as a result and, by the end of March 2015, RapidShare ceased to operate and it is defunct. As of 2017, Rapidshare AG was acquired by Kingsley Global. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RapidShare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RapidShare
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  > A group of people that dislike being bothered by intrusive ads I wonder what percentage of the 45m (unique?) visitors a month had an adblocker of some sort on.
  - m-p-3 4y ago
    I don't have any hard numbers, but I would assume that their userbase was significantly tech-savvy compared to the general population, so the percentage of visitors using an adblocker would have been higher as well.
- shanebellone 4y ago
  "Well. Their main audience was pirates. A group of people that dislike being bothered by intrusive ads, dislike the threats to their privacy that ads pose, and prefers to not pay for access to files because information should be free, or at least prefers to pay as little as possible for access." *thieves
Thaxll 4y ago
Zippyshare had a big flaw, you could link directly the real url of the file so you would not get any adds etc ..
- izzydata 4y ago
  Please don't mention this to Imgur.
  - slig 4y ago
    They changed that behavior years ago.
    - izzydata 4y ago
      What do you mean? Copying a direct link is still an option on Imgur. https://i.imgur.com/snQQ0Dt.jpg https://i.imgur.com/snQQ0Dt.jpg
      - pr0zac 4y ago
        What they're referring to is how if I click that link it gets redirected to the image's viewing page instead of opening the image file directly.
        izzydata 4y ago
        But it doesn't. You can even embed it on another page and just use Imgur bandwidth with no ads. What you are referring to is the following link. https://imgur.com/snQQ0Dt https://imgur.com/snQQ0Dt This on the other hand is a direct image link with no ads. You would have no idea this is on Imgur other than the url. https://i.imgur.com/snQQ0Dt.jpg https://i.imgur.com/snQQ0Dt.jpg
        slig 4y ago
        I guess it depends on your user agent. For me, and I believe the majority of users, after clicking on your second link ending in `.jpg`, it redirects to the first link where there are ads.
skilled 4y ago
They could probably sell the domain for a couple of million just as an exit bonus.
- progx 4y ago
  Who would buy this and for what? There are some sharing companies out there, that could rename themeselve and use that service, but, would they make millions with that to pay the domain?
  - koala_man 4y ago
    Ransomware groups come to mind.
mdrzn 4y ago
Too bad, I grew up using Zippyshare to share my bootleg remixes to fans or school files to friends. Awesome website of his era, just like Megaupload or Megavideo. RIP.
Aeroi 4y ago
I know this goes against everything, but why not monetize using the proven subscription model? With 45m visitors a month if you converted .5% of those to stay at $5 a month you're making $1.125 million a month. It seems like there's a pending backlog of lawsuits that the founders have likely maintained their distance from the platform for. Nobody, no matter how rich you are, throws away a golden goose.
- fornowiamhere 4y ago
  I think directly monetising a platform that is used, among other things(lol, let's be real), to distribute copyrighted materials illegally would put them in some very hot waters.
madballster 4y ago
If there is residual value here (as some claim), why can't the owner sell the business? No buyer willing to assume lawsuit risk?
- Atlas22 4y ago
  Buyers wont be paying much, if any premium right now unless there is a significant asset that is very valuable to multiple businesses (very much a buyers market). Its likely that shutting down before the next big bill hits (end of month?) then liquidating is most profitable route since it appears that it is operating at a loss. Im sure there is residual value here, but probably less as a whole. If there is lawsuit risk, buyers may prefer dissolution of the company and just aquiring its assets instead.
trasz3 4y ago
It’s a bit sad that in 2023, with dirt cheap SSDs and gigabit internet at home, we still default to using some third party hosting for transferring files.
- izzydata 4y ago
  If everyone in the US had gigabit then things would be very different. There are still homes with data limits and 20 megabit upload.
  - trasz3 4y ago
    Then those homes might still use a centralized solution instead, with everyone else using a better one.
    - aidenn0 4y ago
      "are still homes with" is doing a lot of work in that sentence; Cable is by far the most common home internet and plans typically top out around 30mbit. Some places still have DSL as the only option and that's single-digit mbit uploads. There's fiber in my town, but it doesn't reach my house yet and reviews are middling at best, with outages being regular and lasting for hours.
      - trasz3 4y ago
        Erm, no. https://www.speedtest.net/global-index https://www.speedtest.net/global-index; eg the average in Beijing is 177Mbps.
        aidenn0 4y ago
        GP of my comment was specifically talking about the US.
        trasz3 4y ago
        I’m sorry, it appears ignoring problems specific to some flyover states in my follow up comment was a bit too subtle.
Fornax96 4y ago
I run https://pixeldrain.com https://pixeldrain.com. I have been seeing my ad revenue dry up over the last few years as well. Even though the site only grew more popular the ad revenue stayed low. At the start of this year I decided to try running the site without any ads at all. Pixeldrain is now funded by patrons on Patreon. It's working quite well so far. Zippyshare could probably have been made profitable. Maybe it went against their ideology, or they just couldn't be bothered.
- ksec 4y ago
  >Even though the site only grew more popular the ad revenue stayed low. Do we know if Ads are paying less percentage of revenue to you or if that is a general trend?
- boringuser1 4y ago
  [dead]
- hooo 4y ago
  Why would you try to run a site like that based on ad revenue? It makes no sense.
  - Fornax96 4y ago
    I bet ads were extremely profitable when Zippyshare started. The market has shifted from banner ads to video ads. As for me: I didn't know what the alternatives were when I started. The ad revenue was enough to bootstrap the growth cycle. Now I don't need the sidewheels anymore
  - jstarfish 4y ago
    Ad blockers weren't always ubiquitous.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > Pixeldrain is now funded by patrons on Patreon. It's working quite well so far. I'm glad it's working for you. The internet really needs a better business model than advertising. I always mention patronage as an alternative and it's awesome to see successful examples.
COMMENT___ 4y ago
They are writing: > There are still a bunch of smaller reasons, but we could write a book on this, and probably no one would want to read it. I’d read a book about Zippyshare, its history and about all those smaller reasons why they are closing.
iagooar 4y ago
Why not convert it into a SaaS? Have a B2C option that is pretty cheap and then a more expensive option for businesses. This would massively reduce the usage of resources, which is a good thing given that they seem not to be able to pay for the servers, traffic and storage. With 45 million visitors you have huge potential for converting leads into paying customers.
- jacooper 4y ago
  They might as well open a new business, no real company is going to use Zippyshare as a storage Sass.
sebow 4y ago
Rest in bytes zippy. Yes I used it since forever and w/ an adblocker. I wouldn't mind turning off the adblocker for such good(no throttling usually) and free services if they wouldn't have >intrusive< ads that make the web experience cancerous. Instead of having popups just put "normal" ads on the sides if you really need it. Sadly the web trend went for the popup or other malicious ads (imitating legitimate buttons/other elements from a page) which makes users like me use an adblocker shamelessly.

Rest in Peace Zippy!

Already added a working mirror https://dface.online/post/51_file-sharing-site-zippyshare-shutting-down-after-17-years-of-working-file-sharin.html https://dface.online/post/51_file-sharing-site-zippyshare-sh...

dsfgdfgfdg 4y ago

https://zippyshareme.com https://zippyshareme.com

bellBivDinesh 4y ago

So the story is effective ad-blocking killed their business?

cptskippy 4y ago
They said visits were in decline and they'd all but abandoned development of the site. It's been in ktlo for a decade.
nashashmi 4y ago
Or Adblock called for more obnoxious ads, which caused more Adblocking, which killed the business.
Pulcinella 4y ago
Since 2006 we have been on the market in an unchanged form, that is, as ad financed/free file hosting. However, you have been visiting in less and less over the years, as the arguably very simple formula of the services we offer is slowly running out of steam … Over the past year, electricity prices have gone up 2.5 times, which, with a large number of servers, gives a significant increase in costs that we have no way to balance. There are still a bunch of smaller reasons [for closing down], but we could write a book on this, and probably no one would want to read it. Sounds like visits are down and costs are way, way up.
- whstl 4y ago
  It's no surprise that less and less people are accessing them in the last few years. They have apparently blocked access in Europe. Reports show that it is blocked at least in the UK, Germany and Spain.
pif 4y ago
What is sad is that ad-blockers would have never become a necessity, had advertising remained fair (as in: static images, no code execution on browser, no tracking).
- vkou 4y ago
  If people would just behave well, we wouldn't need laws and courts. When there's a profit motive, someone will always cut corners.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    > When there's a profit motive, someone will always cut corners. This only works as a specialisation of "people". Where there's no profit motive, people will also cut corners.
  - appleiigs 4y ago
    Your comment doesn’t make sense. What profit motive? It drove them to shutdown and people to use ad blockers. The feedback loop is positive: behave well -> profit. Your comment discusses the inverse: behave poorly -> go to jail.
    - vkou 4y ago
      The profit motive in question is the motive to fill your screen with shitty, laggy, possibly dangerous ads. Have you visited your local newspaper's website, or a fandom property, lately? Once enough people do that, the users install adblockers, which also hurts advertisers who were not filling your screen with shitty, laggy, possibly dangerous ads.
  - pif 4y ago
    The problem is, we don't have laws and courts for ads. That's why we are all forced to walk around heavily armed and shoot down whoever gets less than two metres apart from us!

redrix 4y ago

Shame to see another relic of the internet-past shutting down. I used to use ZippyShare a fair bit to demo the DLP capabilities of a past employer.

thyrox 4y ago

So basically ad blockers? For all the evil ads are, they do keep a lot of such small businesses running too. Now that we've reached a point where every person has some form of adblock from abp to brave, I think this we're gonna be seeing more and more of this. P.S. I recently cancelled my Kagi subscription too after their recent price hike and search restrictions. So businesses that don't show ads but charge the user directly are also struggling too it seems. Guess doing business nowadays isn't that easy.

nashashmi 4y ago
There is a way out of this. Don’t use third party ad service networks. OTOH, CNN also includes ads that are not JS driven. That is fine but the ads are just terrible quality (lending tree!).
pif 4y ago
Ethical ad-blockers exist. Do ethical advertisers exist?
- abatilo 4y ago
  There's https://www.ethicalads.io/ https://www.ethicalads.io/ if you're only targeting developers
- wongarsu 4y ago
  Plenty, usually in the form of individual websites selling ad space on their website, just like newspapers sell ads in their paper issues. No user tracking necessary, and if you sell based on time you don't even have to track impressions or clicks. But that doesn't fit the "apply to our whitelist" model of many "ethical" ad-blockers.
  - pif 4y ago
    > No user tracking necessary Have that switched to "No user tracking possible", or better still to "static images only", and no whitelist will refuse them.
- 4y ago

VWWHFSfQ 4y ago

Reminds me of https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-online-services.html https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli... The only reason imgur survived is because they ruined their UX in search of monetization.

causi 4y ago
I recently visited Imgur after a few years away. My god has that site fallen. Doing anything takes two or three times as many clicks, ads are everywhere, and 75% of the posts are left-leaning versions of your uncle's shitty political Facebook posts. "Upvote THIS if you think Trump should be arrested!"
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > "Upvote THIS if you think Trump should be arrested!" Oh boy, wouldn't that be a paradise? A 21st century version of ostracism: if enough people upvote something on social media, they can get you arrested.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    It would be deeply ironic if the man who ran on a campaign of "lock her up" and had huge crowds chanting this at his rallies got locked up.
Aperocky 4y ago
But how much longer though?
dizhn 4y ago
"I have started a private service called sr.ht, which I aim to use to fix the problem by only letting my friends and I use it. " Had a little chuckle at the end.

ccity88 4y ago

Its quite sad that ad-blocking is framed as killing this business. Surely it's more akin to a subsidised business failing to move to a more sustainable model? Don't get me wrong I love free no nonsense business models, but as Google and Facebook have shown us, ads are only part of the equation. If we didn't collectively lose trust with the ad industry, and ads weren't so intrusive, I for one (and many others I've spoken to) wouldn't be blocking ads. I go out of my way to disable ad-block on friendly websites and blogs that need the ad revenue; sites that have a responsible and ethical policy surrounding their ad usage. Zippyshare seemed like one of those sites. Unfortunately the rest of the industry had to ruin it for them. Even more sad, this will become the norm and sites will have to move to a paid subscription type model to keep their services alive.

qzx_pierri 4y ago
I welcome a paid model for all sites, honestly. That way, sites aren't slaves to the ideological driven policies of the advertisers. Post something the advertiser doesn't like? Ads get pulled and the site loses money. When you pay for the service, the site owner can raise their middle finger if anyone outside of the site staff doesn't like content on their site. Sites like YouTube are a perfect example of this. Constant censorship and other nonsense because many of their advertisers are American, and thus 'prude as fuck' (lack of a better term). So content on YouTube has slowly been becoming more and more squeaky clean (advertiser friendly). In a few years, YouTube's content policy will be 1:1 with broadcast television. Fuck reliance on advertisers. Eventually, any monetized content online will need to be squeaky clean and society will move onto another model, which is hopefully a paid model. P.S. The idea that content will only be paid for by the golden 18-24 demographic with disposable income (while excluding others) is a myth. If kids can beg their parents for Fortnite skins every month and get Epic Games up to 5 billion in revenue per year[1], then $4 per month to stream content for a streaming site in the future is very possible 1: https://www.charlieintel.com/how-much-money-has-fortnite-made/218252 https://www.charlieintel.com/how-much-money-has-fortnite-mad...
- jodrellblank 4y ago
  Then they are slaves to the customers. Post something the customer doesn't like? Customer leaves and the site loses money. Incentive is for the content to become family friendly low detail low effort lowest-common-denominator because that appeals to largest range of potential customers. > "Sites like YouTube are a perfect example of this. Constant censorship and other nonsense because many of their advertisers are American, and thus 'prude as fuck' (lack of a better term). So content on YouTube has slowly been becoming more and more squeaky clean (advertiser friendly)." You think YouTube could skip the advertisers, sell directly to soccer moms, and then have porn adverts and swearing and raise their middle finger, and that would work?

sourcecodeplz 4y ago

Zippy was cool for mp3s, cracks, plugins, books and smaller files. Then dropbox, google drive and many others came that had no ads and larger file size limits BUT with an actual business model: upgrade to pro/plus/premium etc.

runxel 4y ago

RIP, you'll be missed. However I'm not puzzled by this. The speed was always fast, and they didn't employ any strategies like a lot of the other OCH which made downloading a huge PITA.

petodo 4y ago

RIP Zippy, one of the best filehosters with great speed and no noticable limits between downloads at least there is still Uptobox with very reasonable limits on free accounts (30mins between files and 30 seconds wait time + pretty big file size) and Mega (no waiting, but ~5GB per day)

causi 4y ago
Conveniently Mega only limits you by IP address, not account. You can just swap VPN locations and keep downloading. 1fichier is also pretty incredible.
- ErikHuisman 4y ago
  Zippyshare should add limits and advertise for nordvpn to circumvent these limits.
dapatil 4y ago
You should try out https://filepost.io https://filepost.io (Disclaimer - I own it) I do feel for zippy though. Even for my site, Ad revenue has completely dried up and infrastructure costs now outweigh my revenue.
- Fornax96 4y ago
  I run https://pixeldrain.com https://pixeldrain.com. At the start of this year I completely removed all ads from my site. I'm done with checking ad network after ad network only to find out that they all pay the same: pennies. Pixeldrain now runs on subscribers over at Patreon and it's working quite well actually.

jeffbee 4y ago

> Over the past year, electricity prices have gone up 2.5 times I wonder if the people who constantly yell about the obvious superiority of self-hosting over cloud can internalize this information. The costs of hosting your own computers has often increased. Cloud costs, so far, have only gone down. When they launched them 13 years ago, EC2 "micro" instances cost 1.4¢/hr. Today, they are twice as large, much faster, and cost 0.53¢/hr. In real dollars, the instance cost has declined 73%, and more like 95% in specific throughput. Meanwhile colo prices have gone nowhere but up.

bsder 4y ago
> The costs of hosting your own computers has often increased. Cloud costs, so far, have only gone down. If that's true, it's only true because cloud pricing was highway robbery to begin with. Hurricane Electric (who I chose simply because they always put their price online--other colos should take note) is at $400/month for a cab & GigE. It doesn't take very many online servers to put that in a rounding error. In roughly 20 months, you win against the cloud even if you count CapEx. And, do remember, the cloud companies all charge egress by the byte. Sure, most people don't care, until they become successful and suddenly wind up with a $10K bill in a month. The "cloud" is useful two ways: 1) Pop up servers quickly However, this is should be "I use servers and can transfer them to another provider quickly if I need to." Any provider should work as well as bare metal. 2) Lean heavily into specific services on in the cloud provider. The goal here is that you are cheaper specifically because you don't have a fixed "baseline" that you are always utilizing. In this way, you are completely relying on the fact that the provider can shuffle things to be uber cheap.
bsder 4y ago
I think you are off on your math somewhere or you aren't accounting for something. $0.0053/hr would be roughly $4 per month. Even the uber cheap providers like Hetzner aren't that good.
jodrellblank 4y ago
Unless you are suggesting that Amazon is getting free electricity, then must be either: - Profiting enough from micro instances to pay for the electricity of running them. If so then when you get to using a server full of micro instances you can save money by doing that yourself and not paying Amazon's profit. - Eating the loss and subsidising it from other income. This is convenient for you but not anything to do with the cloud, more to do with the power of a huge company. - Big enough to have arm twisted a fixed price for a long time ahead, pushing the extra cost onto the supplier, so the supplier will go bankrupt and be bailed out by the taxpayer. Again convenient for you but nothing to do with the cloud. - Other? What's your explanation for Amazon not charging customers more despite rising energy costs? You switched "self-hosting" to "colo" which aren't the same things. One can imagine a big non-tech company negotiating fixed prices on their power for their datacenters. One can imagine a big non-tech company investing in regular server refreshes to converge down on more power efficient servers over time.

endisneigh 4y ago

I don't understand - is it not possible to construct a site that does not allow you to download if you have an ad-blocker? It seems trivial: 1. Show an ad, include a special value. 2. Download only if special value is present. 3. If special value is not present, tell user they must disable ad-block to download. Most sites fail to do this not because of technical complexity, but because they don't care about ad-blocking and/or it doesn't affect their business greatly. In ZS's case, they should've implemented this. I chalk this up to poor management tbh. Things like the electricity cost increase could have been balanced with more ads to compensate. The kind of things on ZS tend to be nefarious, and the electricity needed would likely be offset by say, a 15 second video being watched before downloading.

arbuge 4y ago
There are ways to detect certain kinds of ad blocking but they're not always reliable. The client web browser has no obligation to report back to the server with what it's decided to show the user.
- Zurrrrr 4y ago
  I used to want to try and make something that would render ads to a virtual dummy screen, so anything that would check for them would show them as being present, but no user would see them.
  - sbarre 4y ago
    Speaking for myself only here (but I suspect I'm not alone), I don't use an ad blocker to primarily block visual ads (although it's a nice side effect). I use an ad blocker to block tracking networks and protect my privacy, and one of the end results of that is that visual ads get blocked. So I can't imagine a scenario where I'd need to fake-render the visual ad, since the ad code never has the chance to get that far.
    - Zurrrrr 4y ago
      The scenario I was thinking of was a final solution to the cat and mouse game of detecting ad blockers. If the site and js checks and thinks the ad is being displayed but it isn't, that's a win.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ckdarby 4y ago

> "Over the past year, electricity prices have gone up 2.5 times, which, with a large number of servers, gives a significant increase in costs that we have no way to balance." They could have reinvested the earnings in the past to run a more cost effective solution to prevent this happening today. I have seen this countless times where companies will just drain the business of cash and leave everything knowing it'll die eventually in the long run. They had options like reducing the max file size, the number of files, the retention period, etc. They hadn't posted a blog outlining any plans or features for ~6 years.

codetrotter 4y ago
> reducing the max file size Files are only getting bigger over time. Reducing the max file size will leave even fewer people using the service.
- TylerE 4y ago
  If 10% of your users impose 90% of costs, without providing a similarly exaggerated share of income... I'd LOVE to fire those customers.
  - dewey 4y ago
    The way these sites usually work is that there‘s a small group of people uploading a lot and distributing these links everywhere (All the piracy boards). That‘s what gets people to your site and in turn ad impressions. Getting rid of your top uploaded will not be beneficial to your bottom line.
    - TylerE 4y ago
      I'm aware. What I'm saying is you want the guy uploading, like, tons of old arcade ROMs or comic book scans or something... not 50GB bluray rips.
Supermancho 4y ago
> They could have reinvested the earnings in the past to run a more cost effective solution to prevent this happening today. Do you know this for a fact? Assuming there's some simple obvious solution to a declining long-lived business, is questionable.

cute_boi 4y ago

I love Zippyshare. It didn't use those shenanigans that other file sharing website used :(. I will miss it

anenefan 4y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35225494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35225494 My comment there, the short version is just over two years ago, various advertisers on there went mad with hard core porn ads. Additionally here I'll add that I dug back into comments around two years ago, I was told some links were also pointing unsuspecting users into malware sites ... so I guess anyone (the average user) who had to use a zippyshare link basically if they were smart, had to use protection. Hard core porn on sites used at work, or something kids would use is ... the epitome of what not to do.

HDThoreaun 4y ago
I assume it's hard to find advertisers willing to pay for space on piracy sites.
- anenefan 4y ago
  I think but can't be certain, for the longest time zippyshare formed a bridge between forum users to share photos, private collection of info links and notes -- file sizes were generally not large, but not suited for emails. Indispensable really in some forum types to be able sent via private messaging information, charts and pictures. No doubt like everything, the service was used for piracy in the beginning as well ... but it has only been the last few years where I've heard some sites actively using the service to share something that replaced the tv. Advertising can work but as long as it's honest and appropriate to the user base. I think it was Kickass pirate site that went mad for hard porn as well ... I knew it was only a matter of time it would be deemed time for the service to die off, not many people like the idea someone's preteen kid could looking for something, run up on such stuff.

high_byte 4y ago

why close and not sell? with 45m visitors surely someone knows how to monetize it.

korse 4y ago

It isn't just standard ad blockers being used to access Zippyshare. A whole lot of the content is .part files or similar. People share links and run them through specialized downloaders, wget etc. in order to grab all the part files from a link, skipping the ad interface entirely. At one point this was a specialized use case (I think) but I get the feeling that over time this became the norm. As such, I think most of parallels people are making to general ad-block use and the Zippy is based on a bad premise.

manicennui 4y ago

What percentage of the files on Zippyshare were legal?

codetrotter 4y ago

Well. Their main audience was pirates. A group of people that dislike being bothered by intrusive ads, dislike the threats to their privacy that ads pose, and prefers to not pay for access to files because information should be free, or at least prefers to pay as little as possible for access. It’s kind of a wonder that Zippyshare lasted for so long actually. At least they outlived both the original MegaUpload and the original RapidShare. > RapidShare was an online file hosting service that opened in 2002. In 2009, it was among the Internet's 20 most visited websites and claimed to have 10 petabytes of files uploaded by users with the ability to handle up to three million users simultaneously. Following the takedown of similar service Megaupload in 2012, RapidShare changed its business model to deter the use of its services for distribution of files to large numbers of anonymous users and to focus on personal subscription-only cloud-based file storage. Its popularity fell sharply as a result and, by the end of March 2015, RapidShare ceased to operate and it is defunct. As of 2017, Rapidshare AG was acquired by Kingsley Global. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RapidShare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RapidShare

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> A group of people that dislike being bothered by intrusive ads I wonder what percentage of the 45m (unique?) visitors a month had an adblocker of some sort on.
- m-p-3 4y ago
  I don't have any hard numbers, but I would assume that their userbase was significantly tech-savvy compared to the general population, so the percentage of visitors using an adblocker would have been higher as well.
shanebellone 4y ago
"Well. Their main audience was pirates. A group of people that dislike being bothered by intrusive ads, dislike the threats to their privacy that ads pose, and prefers to not pay for access to files because information should be free, or at least prefers to pay as little as possible for access." *thieves

Thaxll 4y ago

Zippyshare had a big flaw, you could link directly the real url of the file so you would not get any adds etc ..

izzydata 4y ago
Please don't mention this to Imgur.
- slig 4y ago
  They changed that behavior years ago.
  - izzydata 4y ago
    What do you mean? Copying a direct link is still an option on Imgur. https://i.imgur.com/snQQ0Dt.jpg https://i.imgur.com/snQQ0Dt.jpg
    - pr0zac 4y ago
      What they're referring to is how if I click that link it gets redirected to the image's viewing page instead of opening the image file directly.
      - izzydata 4y ago
        But it doesn't. You can even embed it on another page and just use Imgur bandwidth with no ads. What you are referring to is the following link. https://imgur.com/snQQ0Dt https://imgur.com/snQQ0Dt This on the other hand is a direct image link with no ads. You would have no idea this is on Imgur other than the url. https://i.imgur.com/snQQ0Dt.jpg https://i.imgur.com/snQQ0Dt.jpg
        slig 4y ago
        I guess it depends on your user agent. For me, and I believe the majority of users, after clicking on your second link ending in `.jpg`, it redirects to the first link where there are ads.

skilled 4y ago

They could probably sell the domain for a couple of million just as an exit bonus.

progx 4y ago
Who would buy this and for what? There are some sharing companies out there, that could rename themeselve and use that service, but, would they make millions with that to pay the domain?
- koala_man 4y ago
  Ransomware groups come to mind.

mdrzn 4y ago

Too bad, I grew up using Zippyshare to share my bootleg remixes to fans or school files to friends. Awesome website of his era, just like Megaupload or Megavideo. RIP.

Aeroi 4y ago

I know this goes against everything, but why not monetize using the proven subscription model? With 45m visitors a month if you converted .5% of those to stay at $5 a month you're making $1.125 million a month. It seems like there's a pending backlog of lawsuits that the founders have likely maintained their distance from the platform for. Nobody, no matter how rich you are, throws away a golden goose.

fornowiamhere 4y ago
I think directly monetising a platform that is used, among other things(lol, let's be real), to distribute copyrighted materials illegally would put them in some very hot waters.

madballster 4y ago

If there is residual value here (as some claim), why can't the owner sell the business? No buyer willing to assume lawsuit risk?

Atlas22 4y ago
Buyers wont be paying much, if any premium right now unless there is a significant asset that is very valuable to multiple businesses (very much a buyers market). Its likely that shutting down before the next big bill hits (end of month?) then liquidating is most profitable route since it appears that it is operating at a loss. Im sure there is residual value here, but probably less as a whole. If there is lawsuit risk, buyers may prefer dissolution of the company and just aquiring its assets instead.

trasz3 4y ago

It’s a bit sad that in 2023, with dirt cheap SSDs and gigabit internet at home, we still default to using some third party hosting for transferring files.

izzydata 4y ago
If everyone in the US had gigabit then things would be very different. There are still homes with data limits and 20 megabit upload.
- trasz3 4y ago
  Then those homes might still use a centralized solution instead, with everyone else using a better one.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    "are still homes with" is doing a lot of work in that sentence; Cable is by far the most common home internet and plans typically top out around 30mbit. Some places still have DSL as the only option and that's single-digit mbit uploads. There's fiber in my town, but it doesn't reach my house yet and reviews are middling at best, with outages being regular and lasting for hours.
    - trasz3 4y ago
      Erm, no. https://www.speedtest.net/global-index https://www.speedtest.net/global-index; eg the average in Beijing is 177Mbps.
      - aidenn0 4y ago
        GP of my comment was specifically talking about the US.
        trasz3 4y ago
        I’m sorry, it appears ignoring problems specific to some flyover states in my follow up comment was a bit too subtle.

Fornax96 4y ago

I run https://pixeldrain.com https://pixeldrain.com. I have been seeing my ad revenue dry up over the last few years as well. Even though the site only grew more popular the ad revenue stayed low. At the start of this year I decided to try running the site without any ads at all. Pixeldrain is now funded by patrons on Patreon. It's working quite well so far. Zippyshare could probably have been made profitable. Maybe it went against their ideology, or they just couldn't be bothered.

ksec 4y ago
>Even though the site only grew more popular the ad revenue stayed low. Do we know if Ads are paying less percentage of revenue to you or if that is a general trend?
boringuser1 4y ago
[dead]
hooo 4y ago
Why would you try to run a site like that based on ad revenue? It makes no sense.
- Fornax96 4y ago
  I bet ads were extremely profitable when Zippyshare started. The market has shifted from banner ads to video ads. As for me: I didn't know what the alternatives were when I started. The ad revenue was enough to bootstrap the growth cycle. Now I don't need the sidewheels anymore
- jstarfish 4y ago
  Ad blockers weren't always ubiquitous.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> Pixeldrain is now funded by patrons on Patreon. It's working quite well so far. I'm glad it's working for you. The internet really needs a better business model than advertising. I always mention patronage as an alternative and it's awesome to see successful examples.

COMMENT___ 4y ago

They are writing: > There are still a bunch of smaller reasons, but we could write a book on this, and probably no one would want to read it. I’d read a book about Zippyshare, its history and about all those smaller reasons why they are closing.

iagooar 4y ago

Why not convert it into a SaaS? Have a B2C option that is pretty cheap and then a more expensive option for businesses. This would massively reduce the usage of resources, which is a good thing given that they seem not to be able to pay for the servers, traffic and storage. With 45 million visitors you have huge potential for converting leads into paying customers.

jacooper 4y ago
They might as well open a new business, no real company is going to use Zippyshare as a storage Sass.

sebow 4y ago

Rest in bytes zippy. Yes I used it since forever and w/ an adblocker. I wouldn't mind turning off the adblocker for such good(no throttling usually) and free services if they wouldn't have >intrusive< ads that make the web experience cancerous. Instead of having popups just put "normal" ads on the sides if you really need it. Sadly the web trend went for the popup or other malicious ads (imitating legitimate buttons/other elements from a page) which makes users like me use an adblocker shamelessly.