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I’m fascinated by the economics of image sharing sites. They fill a fundamental need to share images across other platforms but they seem expensive to run and d
by prepend 3y ago
I’m fascinated by the economics of image sharing sites. They fill a fundamental need to share images across other platforms but they seem expensive to run and difficult to monetize.
Have there been successful image hosters that weren’t just spending money to capture users in order to sell out or eventually enshitten (imgur, giphy, imageshack)?
Shutterstock is selling prints so it will be interesting to see what they do with giphy.
I remember when Imgur started and they were really nice and seemed to be a low cost (I think only one employee) so they could host barebones without making the experience bad for users (ads, data mining, etc).
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y agoJust remember the prices for AWS, CloudFlare, and GCP are for application software. Raw bandwidth are a lot cheaper when it comes to content focused CDNs and dedicated hosting.
- pjc50 3y agoImage hosting has to deal with the moderation problem, especially if it wants to monetize through advertising.
- duxup 3y agoIt seems like and endless Whac-A-Mole of free unprofitable services. Can this go in infinitely?
- xyzzy4747 3y agoThere's always speculative value because some executive somewhere thinks they can turn it around and make it profitable. So it can keep being flipped across different owners. It can go infinitely because the cash comes from elsewhere.
- somedude895 3y agoRising interest rates are putting a stop to this. Finally.
- notatoad 3y agoit will continue for as long as VCs allow it to. it's essentially just burning through VC money to provide free image hosting. every time the funders start trying to make their money back, somebody will start a new free image host funded by a new batch of suckers.
- hedora 3y agoMy guess is that someone will eventually end up creating a bootstrapped lifestyle business, similar to craigslist. Assuming they don’t encrappen it, and there’s some tangential thing they can charge a nominal fee for that rides their network effects, they’ll have a lasting business that will provide ~5-10 people with comfortable income indefinitely.
- notatoad 3y agoi'm pretty sure imgur started as a bootstrapped lifestyle business. and that lasted a few years before they hopped on the funding train
- newjersey 3y agoI don't remember all the details but imgur used to have some pretty strict limits. iirc you could only upload 250 images on a free account? I was wrong. It was worse. 75 was the limit for free users. I think I never reached the limit until they upped it to 225. > In order to get ready for upcoming features, the number of recent images a regular user can have in his/her account has been raised from 75 to 225. Keep in mind that you will still be able to upload more if you go over the limit, it’s just that the older images will be hidden from the account (not deleted!). This is great news, because now you can create even more albums and share all your images at once. > Also, imgur pro accounts have just been made cheaper! A 1 year imgur subscription is now cheaper than any other comparable photo service, including Flickr, Photobucket and ImageShack. With imgur pro, not only is there no limit to the amount of images you can have in your account, there is absolutely no compression, and your images are not modified in any way if they are under 5MB in size. https://blog.imgur.com/2010/06/25/imgur-accounts-and-imgur-pro-accounts/ https://blog.imgur.com/2010/06/25/imgur-accounts-and-imgur-p...
- ghaff 3y agoMicrostock was certainly a mini-rage for a while. All the photographers I knew who played with it got out pretty quickly. There was very little money in it (I played a very little and don't think I ever sold anything.) and a lot of classic stock photography of people requires model release forms.
- throwitawaylord 3y agoShutterstock does not sell prints.
- prepend 3y agoThanks, I confused it with Shutterfly.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- iambateman 3y agoI think the promise of giphy was that advertisers would pay for sponsored gifs. So The Voice gets top placement for “wild crowd” gif and then gets shared X,000,000 times in a native way. It’s a sensible thesis that appears to be invalidated for now.
- petercooper 3y agoI agree. It's interesting because nearly all the GIF searches I use on a regular basis are terrible, yet I wouldn't be too perturbed if I were given relevant/funny/interesting GIFs that contained product placement (say, a GIF for "cheers!" might be someone raising a glass of Coke). I think the problem might be that advertisers can't control context. Someone might say something vile (but legal) on Twitter and get lots of meme GIFs in the replies that advertisers would be very unhappy about, and it's a more direct connection than having your sponsored tweet appear in the chain.
- londons_explore 3y agoA gif sharing service could provide code to the big embedders (ie. twitter, facebook, whatsapp) which scans for bad words and phrases and decides if a particular gif is to be suggested for posting in that particular conversation. If the conversation isn't advertiser suitable, the user just gets to choose from mundane non-branded gifs. That should be enough to satisfy most brand advertisers.
- stemlord 3y agoI think giphy more tried to play the analytics tracking angle. They made it prohibitively difficult to right click > copy .gif url from their site seemingly so they could control sharing through trackable means
- zamnos 3y agoRight. the reason why Facebook wanted Giphy was because they can use that to track users and develop deeper profiles to better sell ads to corporations. eg User searches for "drink", and chooses from a picture of Coca Cola or Pepsi, but chooses Pepsi. Coca Cola'll pay to advertise to current Pepsi drinkers.
- rickdeckard 3y agoShutterstock is selling images with license (!), that's certainly a more stable business model than "crowd-sourced image-hosting". Giphy seems to become a advertising platform itself, with advertisers using it as part of viral campaigns (i.e. have related gifs available when launching a movie), although I doubt that created alot of revenue so far. That said, it's striking how well-embedded giphy is across a huge amount of messaging platforms, which is likely their biggest asset today...
- littlestymaar 3y ago> Shutterstock is selling images with license (!), that's certainly a more stable business model than "crowd-sourced image-hosting". It definitely used to be one at least, but with the rise of automatic generation I wonder how well will Shutterstock be in the next 5 years.
- rickdeckard 3y agoWas curious as well, so I looked up their last investor report. In 2022 they had 24% profit growth, with $32.8m on $215.3m revenue. They invest alot in AI image generation as well, and already offer a commercial product. For their big customers their product might be the best of both worlds: AI-generated images based on prompts, with full legal clearance on use. I doubt a marketing department of i.e. HP wants to risk a legal dispute about some image they used because it was generated by a model which was trained on unlicensed content. Once this scenario is legally solid though....yes, I wonder how well Shutterstock will do...
- riotnrrd 3y agoShutterstock and Getty are both well positioned to sell pre-trained (on their own data, natch) generative models to customers, who can then fine-tune with their own datasets. I think the market for "pretrained models with guaranteed no IP issues" is going to be lucrative. Maybe not enough digits to excite VCs, but more than enough to make up for a decrease in demand for stock images.
- 3y ago
- dugmartin 3y agoI'm sure its been done (I'm guessing many times) but my thought would be to have a free service that auto watermarks all images with the image hosts domain name and upsell a paid account that doesn't watermark images. If you get 0.01% paid and keep costs low by shopping around for CDNs I think it could be a good "lifestyle" business as long as you had some kind of auto moderation system.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoWhatsApp used to charge $1/year before the Meta acquisition. If you could convince people to pay $3/GB, that'd be enough to front the content with Cloudflare and store the data in the Internet Archive forever. Still need to solve the moderation problem, but it isn't impossible.
- BizarroLand 3y agoIf people are paying to host the material, isn't what they host on them? You could even have a lawyer add something like, "You are purchasing hosting rights for yourself and therefore take all responsibility for what you host. We will work with any relevant government authorities whose jurisdiction you are under to provide them information of your activities on this service if the products you provide violate local, state, or federal laws. You agree to post nothing illegal and if you violate that you agree to own all responsibility, legal, personal, or financial, for your posted materials... blah blah blah" And then submit everything posted to csam scanners. Wouldn't that be enough?
- notatoad 3y ago> We will work with any relevant government authorities blah blah blah the problem is that costs money. you either pay the staff to do the moderation at upload, or you pay the staff to handle all the various governments that come after you. either way it's expensive, but dealing with the government's lawyers is probably more expensive. and no, just running through a CSAM scanner isn't nearly enough.
- Rockjodd 3y agoNot a general pure image sharing site, but one dedicate for wallpapers (and more) for your personal device (ie your phone), but Zedge did/still provides sharing UGC (user generated content) and as well a premium service for artists. They are in the margins of positive income at least last I checked.
- amne 3y agoAnd this is exactly where IPFS makes sense for me. As long as the community wants something to exist it can exist for free. If only you want it to exist, host it. When you no longer care, it will exist until no one hosts it anymore.
- nebalee 3y agoPlatforms are somewhat shielded from liability for user provided content. How does that work for IPFS?
- astrange 3y agoShould be okay if you're in the US. I wouldn't want to host in other countries unless I was a lawyer. (Where "okay" means "you may get subpoenas you have to answer.")
- stemlord 3y agoIf this were the only option, I bet most people would realize how much of the web really doesn't benefit them in any meaningful way, but merely gets used because it's there, and can be removed from their lives with minimal grief
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lapufifarre668 3y ago[flagged]
- qingcharles 3y agoShutterstock sells stock photos. They have an excellent inventory and good prices and I've bought plenty from them in the past for web projects. But.. their business just went down the plughole with the advent of text-to-image AI. Now you can get pretty much exactly the image you needed without having to spend hours trawling through pre-made photographs.
- Anunayj 3y agoAnd it's extremely funny since most of these text to image models were container Shutterstock watermarked images, to the point it thinks humans see the world with a big shutterstock watermark across it with certain prompts.
- ilammy 3y agoNext you’re going to tell me LiveLeak logo does not appear on the premises shortly before an accident?
- hackernewds 3y agowhat then happened to imgur? they suddenly decided to ban NSFW imagery and move on to becoming a reddit themselves