I like the 2 sign up popups when reading about the very service disappearing!
Does anyone have a view into why? Did they run out of outside funding? Another interest rate kill?
Does anyone have a view into why? Did they run out of outside funding? Another interest rate kill?
Getting bought up has not generally been a positive thing for anyone but the founders cashing out in a long time.
All independent image hosts suffer the same fate. There's simply no money in it. The moment you try to monetize people will move to a new free service, and the cycle starts over.
Maybe a service like this should start with ads and paid plans (that unlock restrictions), keep their running costs low, and never stop being an image hosting site?
Too many start without ads, get users and some investment and then spend it all on expensive AWS hosting/CDN bills and employees that are hired to create a social media platform... and then they stop being an image hosting website, fill the site with ads, focus too much on growth, and so on. I don't blame them for taking a big pay check, but I don't think the entrepreneur type works well for image hosting.
Why did they "have" to raise money and expand? Maybe this was sarcasm and I missed it in which case ignore.
They were profitable but then they haaaaad to go and raise money.
:-)
The problem is that it's just not that profitable. What is an advertiser going to do, with the knowledge that internet people like to look at cats?
I was stating we have enough of it as is. No need to be snarky when you couldn’t be bothered to read. Of course it exists, what kind of troglodyte do you take me as, sir?!
Even if they were to insist on making their money by pushing ads, doing it in a way that doesn't degrade the service would go a long way toward keeping users around.
When I think about the massive amount of data image hosts collect, I have to imagine there should be ways to make money from that information without any impact on the user's experience uploading or viewing photos.
As far as I can tell the biggest problem image hosts have is dealing with our insane copyright laws. Users just want to share information, while companies want to act as gatekeepers and toll collectors which often leaves image hosts caught in the middle. They hold massive data sets of our collective culture and interests, but have a lot of limits on what can be done with it. Most of their content was uploaded to them in violation of copyright laws to start with.