You should read this:
https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli...
Disclaimer: I wrote it
https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli...
Disclaimer: I wrote it
When one service becomes poisoned (as you described it) - I move to another service. Once upon a time that was Imgur, followed by puush, followed by minus, followed by pomfse, and now I use vgy.me and mixtape.moe (when vgy.me's servers go down, which is rare but happens). There are no shortage of image hosts around to choose from.
Your writeup is right on the money. It isn't a service that scales well and any monetization tends to lead to users dipping to greener pastures. Imgur being a strange exception.
Itsosticky was designed from the outset to be an image sharing service with community potential, contrasted with image hosting, it's a service that facilitates quick sharing of an image or screenshot with a friend or group.
When used for its intended purpose, direct sharing, as opposed to free hosting for hotlinking, there are features that make it worthwhile sharing an Itsosticky resource URI rather than a direct link to an image file. For example, zoom capabilities, that some people may find superior to those available natively in a web browser, albums and easy social sharing links, and not least, fast uploads from phones without the need for a dedicated app.
All users are invited to publish their images to the gallery for greater social participation or exhibition.
I can't comment on what might be right or wrong with other sites, not in the capacity of someone promoting a competing product.
Itsosticky is fast (server hardware permitting), modern, has no advertising at all at the moment, and no third-party sharing widgets.
I can't discuss plans for monetisation - there are none as yet.
Certainly no startup but a self sustaining, non-commercial image host could be nice.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150211095158/https://mediacru....
I mean, a few will, but I think you need to create something that actually solves someones problem in a meaningful way (that is unique compared to free services).
When I started building Theneeds, we wanted users to be able to post, like in Twitter. And soon, we wanted users to be able to attach photos or other media.
For media in the sense of an url that we then embed/display it's relatively easy. And even easier if you pay for an external service like embed.ly to do the job.
For images it's a mess. We had to take care about uploading, resizing, posting async to s3, invalidating caches, and of course displaying. If I had to do that again, I'd surely look for an external service (that I didn't find at that time).
Maybe this is a viable way to monetize? I guess that there are quite a good number of companies that need upload+display of UG images, or at least that they could do it if it was easier to plug in.
Just for reference, embed.ly costs 20$/mo for just display, so I guess you could at least ask for that + storage costs.
Next, you could add additional services such as cdn support, or anti spam/copyright infringement/adult content/etc.