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Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

> Hard drive space is incredibly cheap

Actually, no it isn't and at scale it makes it even more expensive, because you need redundancy. We are talking about RAID and CDN, not to mention that at scale hardware breaks a lot more often.

What actually makes it palatable for businesses such as Yahoo or Google is that many people pay for this storage without using it, while heavy users that share a lot help by marketing the product through their sharing to others.

On the other hand I've got 50 GB worth of data uploaded on Flickr. You can't tell me that 50 GB of redundant on-demand storage is worth $25 / year, unless you live in some kind of fairy land. I also have only a couple of photos shared. So what value does Flickr get from me?

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>Actually, no it isn't and at scale it makes it even more expensive, because you need redundancy. We are talking about RAID and CDN, not to mention that at scale hardware breaks a lot more often.

That's related to reliability not scaling per see. Building a highly reliable system is far cheaper when you reach the scale of Google or Amazon because you can rationalize purchase. Actually, I bet price of hardware can totally be neglected next to admin and bandwidth cost.

> On the other hand I've got 50 GB worth of data uploaded on Flickr. You can't tell me that 50 GB of redundant on-demand storage is worth $25 / year, unless you live in some kind of fairy land.

I must live in fairy land. :-) You can buy 4 decent 1TB for 400$ that will allow you to cater for 20 users at 20$ per user. Conservatively you can expect them to live 3 years on average which brings the cost to 7$ per user per year. Add a 400$ server good enough to do software RAID. Let's say 5 years of life expectancy it adds 5$. It's 12$ per user plus network cost on a lan.

Flickr uses better material and pay bandwidth and admin. But they have economy of scale and can put far more than 20 50GB users on 1TB on average because a lot of them don't use them fully. I think they are above break even point at 25$/year.

If you do the math, Flickr makes about 50-70 million per year in revenue.

It's probably past break-even point, but it's not too profitable for Yahoo. If it were, then Yahoo wouldn't let it stagnate for so long (although it could be argued that Flickr has immense potential and Yahoo failed to see it).

And that's why I said users are still the product. At scale, products have to go way beyond break even point, otherwise it's a drain of resources.

And that's assuming every user has 50GB worth of photos - which, for the record, is a lot of photos. Most are probably in the low hundreds-of-MB range, which brings your cost per user down by an order of magnitude, at least.

50GB? Are you sure? That's over 1700 full-resolution RAW images. (Roughly-estimated at 30MB each.)

Even if that is the case, you're welcome! I'm subsidizing your account. :)

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