Zippyshare quits after 17 years, 45M visits per month makes no money
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
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.
I wonder what percentage of the 45m (unique?) visitors a month had an adblocker of some sort on.
*thieves
It might be something else, but it isn't the same as nicking your car keys or tunic.
Things hold more value than simply being a sum of its parts.
Now, you could always make the argument that creation of value only happens when a physical artifact is built, but that would also be a general argument against white collar jobs and make it okay for corporations to not pay a knowledge worker such as a software developer or a technical writer, simply because they provided a copy of their work.
If you have a painting and are asking $1000, and I take it, you lost the $1000 you probably would have made eventually. If I take a look at it, I didn't steal $1000 from you. If I photograph it, I still didn't steal $1000 from you. If I print it out at home and put it on the wall, I still didn't steal $1000 from you.
> If I photograph it, I still didn't steal $1000 from you.
This is where the inductive logic breaks down, because you are unlikely to make a perfect substitute (in other words, copy) of the product by simply looking at it, but by photographing it, now you can, which means you have denied compensation to the author of the work by being able to produce a perfect substitute.
> If I'm not willing to pay a creator for their content, it must not have any value to me.
If it doesn't have any value to you, why are you making a copy of it in the first place? :)
It's not theft, it's not "piracy," and if we're going to liken it to murder or grand larceny we may as well go all the way with it and call it "terrorism."
No, copyright violation is and always been an act of forgery.
Literally: the act of producing an unauthorized copy of a document, work of art, [etc.].
I concede. This is the better description.
Even then, doesn't forgery entail presenting the work as if it were an original? It's not quite the same if I make a copy of something where 'originality' doesn't apply and it is a 1:1 duplicate. Maybe NFTs will fix this ;)
They do, but here's where analogies become incoherent or inapplicable. Mind that "original" doesn't have to mean "master copy;" many business models (like software) trade in authorized copies.
You don't buy ownership rights to movies-- you're buying limited exhibition rights (do they still put the FBI warning at the beginning of the DVD? I haven't seen one in years). Even when you buy the DVD, you don't really own anything other than a permission slip to show it to a half-dozen people at a time, in your own home.
Thus, making unauthorized copies of a movie amounts to forging new licensing agreements, where future licensees are not accountable to the rightsholder.
Maybe the best analogy would be an NDA-- "we'll show you this movie this one time, but you can't record/copy it and show it to others." Nobody is sympathetic to the lamentations of corporate media lawyers and their contractual disputes, thus, we get lame analogies about stealing your car to try to make their struggles relatable enough to dissuade the behavior.
On the subject of the term piracy, if you are going to pick a heinous crime to represent your infringement, you might as well call it software rape, it is closer to what you are actually doing.
I pay for a seedbox myself.
Zippyshare could probably have been made profitable. Maybe it went against their ideology, or they just couldn't be bothered.
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
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.
I do like the financial security of monthly subscriptions though. Means you need to worry a lot less about recurring costs as a company.
Do we know if Ads are paying less percentage of revenue to you or if that is a general trend?
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.
Files are only getting bigger over time. Reducing the max file size will leave even fewer people using the service.
Getting rid of your top uploaded will not be beneficial to your bottom line.
Do you know this for a fact? Assuming there's some simple obvious solution to a declining long-lived business, is questionable.
Which seems entirely reasonable for a free service?
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.
OTOH, CNN also includes ads that are not JS driven. That is fine but the ads are just terrible quality (lending tree!).
But that doesn't fit the "apply to our whitelist" model of many "ethical" ad-blockers.
Have that switched to "No user tracking possible", or better still to "static images only", and no whitelist will refuse them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26769141
I hope people don't use adblocker on that site since it provides so much value.
https://www.reddit.com/r/photopea/comments/11wf70z/comment/j...
On the upside of this, there is an insane amount of flat-out terrible web content that would become unprofitable if ads truly become no longer viable. Blog spam, content farms, click bait, etc.
See it already knows how to do it. By the way it recommends against it.
Contextual Advertising: Chatbots can use contextual advertising by analyzing the conversations to understand what users are discussing, and then provide ads that relate to the topic. For example, if a user is discussing travel, a chatbot could provide them with ads for travel packages.
Personalized Recommendations: Chatbots can use machine learning algorithms to understand user preferences and recommend products that the user is likely to be interested in. For example, if a user frequently talks about health and wellness, a chatbot could provide them with ads for vitamins or supplements.
**Product Placement: Chatbots can subtly promote products or services within the conversation itself. For example, if a user is discussing a particular product or service, the chatbot could mention a related product or service as a suggestion.
The last one being the most insidious.
Although this may not be all bad though, companies could come together to provide subscription bundles. There's also Apple news and the likes, but news media typically have a hostile relation with big tech.
Is there any data to support this? Doesn't seem real, even 10% of all users having some kind of adblock would be suprising to me.
Edit: wow, I'm way off, 42% according to https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users.
If you can't make money without spamming ads from third parties, then you never had much of a business model.
More ad blockers means less sleazy predatory businesses.
Nothing wrong with people or companies letting me know about things they are selling that I might even like.
But a) the majority of advertising we see for big companies is not needed and b) my point still stands that if you can't make money except through web ads, you don't have a solid business model.
It's probably true that a huge number of sites providing online content without a paywall don't have a solid business model. They'd probably mostly go away absent ads though and subscriptions for those with a paywall would increase.
How many sites do you regularly read that you wouldn't mind paying $1 or 2 for?
I don't mean big sites like HN or Reddit or whatever, they are not going anywhere, but a ton of small kind of specific sites, they are going to have to turn to that model.
Look at the amount of sites that cover say MCU movies, most of them only exist because of ad money, not because people really enjoy their writing and insights.
IMO that would make the Internet a much better place.
I'm glad to see more push back against ads and the toxic ecosystem that it brings with it.
Recently I got an advert like "unsold camper vans being sold off cheap in UK". It's the kind of Taboola/Outbrain title that I didn't believe was true but I was watching some camping content[1] and I clicked the ad. Who knows, maybe it would be interesting to see how much they were discounted and maybe it would support the site I was on. It took me to a page of 'best searches' which had nothing to do with camper vans or any specific sale. The searches were things like 'biggest car dealership uk'. I clicked one, it took me to a Yahoo! search for that generic and unrelated search term.
I have no idea what created any 'value' anywhere in that. Who paid someone to make a website with generic searches to Yahoo!? Who paid someone to run a lying advert pointing to an unrelated link to a Yahoo! search?
Who thinks that "my attention effectively paid for something" in that couple of minutes is real and not laughable delusion?
[1] I have no intention of buying a camper van, so even if the ad was honest and accurate it wouldn't have added any value to anything. Point is, it wasn't, and most ads like that aren't.
Not to mention that malvertising is still an issue that affects even major sites. In my view, browsing the web without an ad blocker is like hooking up with strangers without using PrEP - it's just not a good idea.
* I like the site.
* The ads are static images or text.
* The ads are hosted locally.
* The ads are not malicious.
If any of the above is not true, the blocking stays.
It's not about what "ought" or any sort of morality, more of a factual statement of how the world works.
I have very few truly "favorite sites". Most of them are completely disposable. Eg, I don't see myself ever paying for a website that provides song lyrics -- it's a fully optional service, and entirely fungible.
I think it's possible a limited return to an "old internet" model to some extent, where some random person might just posts lyrics of their favorite band just because they like it.
For the very few actual favorites, probably.
> Would that be a win in your book? Always honestly intrigued by such world views.
Extremely so. First, no ads. Second, a site that must please its users or go bankrupt. That's a win/win in my book.
Such a change likely comes along with improvements in the site's quality. Eg, paid Youtube competitors don't want to feed me hogwash all day in hopes I watch more ads. Bandwidth is expensive, they're not getting any more money from me, and there are no ads to pay for increased consumption. So their priority becomes a smaller amount of high quality content.
In practice it seems be go subscription, and then make things that used to be free to everyone require not just the basic subscription but a premium one.
There aren't a lot such sites, though.
I am glad the ad model is dying. What a waste of resources that was!
With newspapers and magazines, picking up a copy and estimating the distribution of the paper via a 3rd party (such as Nielsen) answers all these questions.
I'd like to hear about a solution that addresses that. It seems fundamentally incompatible with the conditions of "hosted locally" and "static images or text" (which means you can't run JS to verify whether the ad was actually displayed).
The problem with this approach is that it's a "he said, she said" situation where both parties can claim that the other is producing fraudulent numbers. It can only be resolved with litigation, which is not what anyone wants when all they wanted to do is get some sales numbers up.
Also, if you're familiar with the state of advertising fraud, faking conversions with botnets and residential proxies are an absolutely real thing.
I don't get it. The sites that you like will go bankrupt, and you won't be able to read them anymore. Or do you have an agenda, and you are okay to sacrifice the sites that you like?
If I like a site, and I want it to exist* I disable my ad blocker, and bear with the ads. But probably we visit different sites, or I have a higher tolerance against ads.
* my morals have gotten so low I would happily steal from the people that provide me value, but I won't do that because I am afraid they will close their businesses
Well, if I turn off the adblocker, the resulting deluge of ads makes that site a site I that I don't like, so it doesn't really matter to me whether I can read them anymore because it won't be in the set of "Sites I Like To Read".
There are many more people who want their content be read, even for free, than there are people available to read that content.
Because we have have oversupply of content, a significant quantity being good, is there any reason to expect that the price for that content will not be driven downwards?
It's why the majority of competent artists don't make much money from their art and have a job in addition to their art: there's an oversupply of guitarists, painters, sculptors, poets, authors, singers, dancers, songwriters.
Currently there's also an oversupply of blog sites, news sites, news aggregators, learning resources (How to code sites, recipe sites, etc), with the most popular ones being the ones which had the most capital (for SEO, blog-spamming, etc) to get the most visitors, and that capital is grown by degrading the quality of the site with ads.
I imagine a net where the amount of capital you have means nothing because ads don't make a difference to the bottom line, and every site is a net expense. This would result in only very cheap sites, which means mostly static hosting (because it's cheap).
If the people who care to make money of the site but don't care about the content can't make any money, the only ones who are left are those who care enough about the content to take a small hit to publish that content.
Put it differently, sometimes you feel guilty about not allowing the sites you like to abuse your computer.
That feeling doesn’t seem healthy to me, tbh.
Surprised something as fundamental as search uncorrupted by advertising isn't, on principle, worth paying for.
It's worth telling friends and family: stop being the product sold to advertisers, start paying companies that serve users.
Even now, with my adblocker off I would have a hard time finding the real search result or the real download button. Usually, the most prominent element on a page without an adblocker on leads to spam or malware. And I'm just not interested in figuring out what is real and what is not when an adblocker solves the entire problem for me.
For instance, website of someone I know was growing and at one point got £1500 from ads in a month. The next month it has dropped to £500 and never gone over £600, no matter how big of the traffic was hitting the site.
That was revenue for about 500k monthly unique users (EU, UK, US, no dodgy traffic).
It's like an artificial cap was placed on that account.
Finding companies to advertise directly was difficult, because they already used established platforms and were reluctant to deal directly.
And so small business eventually died.
I don't. I've never used an ad blocker.
If I don't like the ads on a site, I don't visit it. In a lot of cases, ads are a minor annoyance. Most of the time they are fine (to me). In some cases (Youtube, for example) I pay to not see ads. That seems fair all around.
I have never had malware or any of the other stuff people claim to be the reason for using ad blockers. I feel like I just live in a different world from everyone else.
I'd pay for the service if all search engines charged that much, because search is so useful. But in that world, I'd be more cautious about searching casually, for the same reason I limited online time back when the main cost was per-minute dialup phone bill. (Not in the USA.)
I don't like the ads on Google, but unlimited casual searches any time of day is very appealing.
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.
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.
The only reason imgur survived is because they ruined their UX in search of monetization.
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.
Had a little chuckle at the end.
> 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.
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.
- 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.
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.
Even the uber cheap providers like Hetzner aren't that good.
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-mad...
> "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?
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.
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.
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)
Pixeldrain now runs on subscribers over at Patreon and it's working quite well actually.
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.
I used to use ZippyShare a fair bit to demo the DLP capabilities of a past employer.
…
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.
They have apparently blocked access in Europe.
Reports show that it is blocked at least in the UK, Germany and Spain.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If the site and js checks and thinks the ad is being displayed but it isn't, that's a win.
I was just pointing out that it's unlikely we'd be in that scenario, since this approach feels like it would imply letting the ad JS run, but tricking it into thinking that an ad was displayed. Or am I missing something?
If I understood correctly, that means the ad's JS would still run in the background and run any included tracking code, which is what I think a lot of people try to prevent with an ad blocker, more than just hiding the visual ad.
My thinking is that the visual and tracking ads are often one and the same. Much tracking is invisible and many ads are well-behaved, but I would say most visual ads are tracking ads also.
For me, as much as I care about tracking and stuff, it's been really nice not seeing basically any ads on my web experience for the last 10 years, so I think really I just wanted to attempt to 'end' the cat and mouse game. At least for a while.
It was a cat and mouse game for a while, but ultimately, if you want to detect if someone is using adblock, you need to do it in JS. And then the ad blockers will just add that piece of JS to their block lists.
Since the adblocker strats are necessarily public, you could even have a system to automatically monitor them and apply a set of composable tweaks which breaks the current public release.
But all that only works, because it’s only active on a single website and could change in any way we want in minutes. If it were widespread, it would quickly be blocked, and changes would have to be replicated by everyone using it.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.