>> We moved the platform and every photo to Amazon Web Services (AWS)
This is not a way to go for a financially troubled company.
The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help
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Re: The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help
#12>> We moved the platform and every photo to Amazon Web Services (AWS) This is not a way to go for a financially troubled company.
This!
This should be emphasised above all other concerns - AWS is absolutely the WORST choice to go for if the company is already struggling with money or not (yet) making any money. It's literally a hole for burning money.
You simply don't go for AWS until you have a superb business plan how to make significantly more money off of your service than Amazon does.
Re: The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help
#13>> We moved the platform and every photo to Amazon Web Services (AWS) This is not a way to go for a financially troubled company.
> We moved the platform and every photo to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the industry leader in cloud computing, and modernized its technology along the way. As a result, pages are already 20% faster and photos load 30% more quickly. Platform outages, including Pandas, are way down. Flickr continues to get faster and more stable, and important new features are being built once again.
SmugMug did it primarily to improve stability and performance. They point out that Flickr hosts tens of billions of photos with 100M registered users and hundreds of thousands of paying customers across the globe. I see the need to use AWS (or any cloud provider for that matter) as a necessity to run a paid web service cost effectively at this scale.
Re: The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help
#14Smugmug haven't exactly been kind to the Flickr community - they walked back the "free forever" promises made by Marissa Meyer and deleted a lot of photos belonging to anyone who didn't subscribe to a pro plan after the acquisition. I'm not sure how they expect the community to have much goodwill towards them after that move.
My photography teachers stressed the importance of "culling" your work and displaying only the best photographs you've taken. I think allowing 1000 free photos is very generous for a fine art photography platform, which is what I want it to be.
I've been taking photography seriously as a hobby for the past three years, and I use Flickr primarily as my portfolio, and right now I have between 100-200 photos on my account. I largely have positive feelings about what SmugMug have been doing with Flickr since their aquisition.
Re: The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help
#15>> We moved the platform and every photo to Amazon Web Services (AWS) This is not a way to go for a financially troubled company.
What is the way to go?
Re: The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help
#16Discussion of this topic yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21841813
Re: The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help
#17I don’t know how the low promo price helps instead of harm them?
Volume.
Let's say their current revenue is R. The 25% promo reduces their revenue to 0.75R, but say they get y% more subscribers. Calculations show that if they can get an increase of more than y > 33.33% in subscriptions, then their promo works.
Re: The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help
#18>> We moved the platform and every photo to Amazon Web Services (AWS) This is not a way to go for a financially troubled company.
If you're spending far more money maintaining technical debt-ridden on-premises solutions, then moving to AWS most certainly is the way to go.
Re: The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help
#19>> We moved the platform and every photo to Amazon Web Services (AWS) This is not a way to go for a financially troubled company.
> We moved the platform and every photo to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the industry leader in cloud computing, and modernized its technology along the way. As a result, pages are already 20% faster and photos load 30% more quickly. Platform outages, including Pandas, are way down. Flickr continues to get faster and more stable, and important new features are being built once again. SmugMug did it primarily to improve…
It's a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem, but not really. They still needed a solid business plan how to earn money from Flickr before moving to AWS (or any other expensive global cloud) - this kind of looks like they've thought of asking for money AFTER the move.
Hope the 30% increase in performance was worth it...
Re: The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help
#20Smugmug haven't exactly been kind to the Flickr community - they walked back the "free forever" promises made by Marissa Meyer and deleted a lot of photos belonging to anyone who didn't subscribe to a pro plan after the acquisition. I'm not sure how they expect the community to have much goodwill towards them after that move.
This was my question as well.
SmugMug presumably did their due diligence before making the acquisition, they should have had a decent idea of what it would cost them to operate Flickr even with the old unlimited-storage model. So I was surprised after they made the acquisition to see them abandon that model and delete tons of images users had uploaded to the service in good faith -- it seemed like the cost of hosting those images was something they should have factored into their planning. But if that's what it takes for them to keep the service up and running, I figured, maybe it's an acceptable sacrifice.
Now they come back a year later and say, whoops, we can't make the math work on this thing even after deleting all those photos. Which makes me wonder if the math ever really worked -- if they ever had a realistic plan for operating this service at all -- or if they just saw it was up for sale cheap one day, and bought it without really working out the business end of the equation. Statements like "[w]e didn’t buy Flickr because we thought it was a cash cow" make me suspect it was the latter.
There's also a weird dissonance in this appeal that gives me pause. If you're writing a message about how you're struggling to break even, you probably shouldn't trumpet how you've moved the whole system onto AWS, a notoriously expensive hosting option for things like static images. And statements like "Unlike platforms like Facebook, we also didn’t buy it to invade your privacy and sell your data" come across as vaguely threatening: "nice community you've got here, it'd be shame if we had to monetize it."