Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mind if I ask the name of your image hosting service?
It's mentioned in the post: https://sr.ht/
Show HN: A new image sharing service
21–30 of 39 posts
Re: Show HN: A new image sharing service
#22You should read this: https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli... Disclaimer: I wrote it
For consumers this isn't too big of a deal. There are plenty of good-hearted people out there and "host my images" isn't something that requires a lot of personal trust (at least, for the kind of images I host). Some hosts don't scale much and can survive off donations. Others become too large and fall under their own weight.
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.
Re: Show HN: A new image sharing service
#23You should read this: https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli... Disclaimer: I wrote it
For consumers this isn't too big of a deal. There are plenty of good-hearted people out there and "host my images" isn't something that requires a lot of personal trust (at least, for the kind of images I host). Some hosts don't scale much and can survive off donations. Others become too large and fall under their own weight. When one service becomes poisoned (as you described it) - I move to another service. Once up…
The internet doesn't need another ten thousand broken links when this one goes under, too.
Re: Show HN: A new image sharing service
#24You should read this: https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli... Disclaimer: I wrote it
Out of curiosity, what were the main costs for the services you were involved in? Engineers? CPU for resize/transcoding? Storage? Bandwidth?
Re: Show HN: A new image sharing service
#25You should read this: https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli... Disclaimer: I wrote it
tl;dr: what about developers?
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.
Re: Show HN: A new image sharing service
#26Wow that looks nothing like imgur :/
Re: Show HN: A new image sharing service
#27You should read this: https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli... Disclaimer: I wrote it
Out of curiosity, what were the main costs for the services you were involved in? Engineers? CPU for resize/transcoding? Storage? Bandwidth?
Just the hosting costs. Our costs were pretty low, actually, but it was out of our own pockets and never turned a profit.
Re: Show HN: A new image sharing service
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, what were the main costs for the services you were involved in? Engineers? CPU for resize/transcoding? Storage? Bandwidth?
Just the hosting costs. Our costs were pretty low, actually, but it was out of our own pockets and never turned a profit.
Were they low enough that they could conceivably be satisfied by donations?
Certainly no startup but a self sustaining, non-commercial image host could be nice.
Re: Show HN: A new image sharing service
#29You should read this: https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli... Disclaimer: I wrote it
tl;dr: what about developers? 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,…
Well, this is an incredibly difficult market to compete in. You need something really special to stand out and attract users, or devs won't bother with your service. Other sites like Imgur already have the mindshare and you need to somehow get huge and find an effective monetization strategy to pull it off. Big image hosting sites are expensive and you won't be able to turn a profit for a long time, and if you're paying for it out of pocket it's going to go south pretty quick. Especially if you don't pay for the high end infrastructure, your site will get slow as the load piles on (and it will pile on and you will see service-disrupting abuse) and most users will leave without a second thought if they have to wait more than a second or two to see their images.
Re: Show HN: A new image sharing service
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just the hosting costs. Our costs were pretty low, actually, but it was out of our own pockets and never turned a profit.
Were they low enough that they could conceivably be satisfied by donations? Certainly no startup but a self sustaining, non-commercial image host could be nice.
MediaCrush did accept donations and had ads, but the actual donor turnout and ad revenue was pretty pathetic.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150211095158/https://mediacru....