The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help • Hacker News Board

Re: The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help

#31

Post by QuinnyPig » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 2:44 AM UTC

paxys wrote: post #29

altmind wrote: post #11

>> We moved the platform and every photo to Amazon Web Services (AWS) This is not a way to go for a financially troubled company.

I was wondering how long it would take for the HN experts to show up.

Indeed. I fix AWS bills for a living, and I wouldn’t dream of saying whether this was a smart move or not without a careful look at the infrastructure, the financial model of the business, and a series of discussions with the engineering and finance teams.

Somehow HN experts can bypass all of that and do what I do full time with basically no information about the company in question. I really should hire a few of them.

Re: The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help

#32

Post by opportune » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 4:03 AM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #20

scjody wrote: post #9

Smugmug 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…

Yeah, I’m guessing moving to AWS is probably destroying their opex due to the egress fees. Not something I would recommend to anybody who serves heavy content potentially hundreds/thousands of times for each object.

Re: The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help

#33

Post by bubba1236 » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 5:44 AM UTC

QuinnyPig wrote: post #31

paxys wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering how long it would take for the HN experts to show up.

Indeed. I fix AWS bills for a living, and I wouldn’t dream of saying whether this was a smart move or not without a careful look at the infrastructure, the financial model of the business, and a series of discussions with the engineering and finance teams. Somehow HN experts can bypass all of that and do what I do full time with basically no information about the company in question. I really should hire a few of the…

lmaoo

Re: The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help

#34

Post by amatecha » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 6:32 AM UTC

I've already been a Pro subscriber since 2010. Not sure what else I can do to support them, but I really don't want Flickr to disappear. It was odd they raised the price. Why don't they lower it, increasing the number of Pro users? Or does it not work that way? Somehow I feel like switching to AWS will only increase the costs to them, despite any user-facing improvement.

Re: The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help

#35

Post by amatecha » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 7:01 AM UTC

penetrator wrote: post #7

just raise pro price

In fact, they already did. It used to be $24.95/year and was changed to $49.95/year in 2013 https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/20/yahoo-drops-flickr-pro-to-...

Re: The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help

#36

Post by amatecha » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 7:03 AM UTC

scjody wrote: post #9

Smugmug 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.

Did they actually delete the photos, or are the photos just inaccessible "until" you subscribe to Pro?

Re: The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help

#37

Post by ckdarby » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 1:44 PM UTC

opportune wrote: post #32

smacktoward wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, I’m guessing moving to AWS is probably destroying their opex due to the egress fees. Not something I would recommend to anybody who serves heavy content potentially hundreds/thousands of times for each object.

Can leave everything on AWS but end up building out the CDN in some unmetered datacenters.

95th billing makes this kind of stuff cheap :)

Re: The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help

#38

Post by qes » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 7:20 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #24

ignoramous wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They still needed a solid business plan how to earn money from Flickr... SmugMug, by their own admission, bought Flickr to help keep it alive. Currently, they're not even looking to make money but reduce the operating costs. I'm sure they didn't take the decision to move to AWS lightly, at all. > ...this kind of looks like they've thought of asking for money AFTER the move. May be you're right that it might have be…

Bandwidth and storage is likely still killing them. Should've put it in Backblaze B2 and paid Cloudflare for CDN.

Would probably cut their image hosting costs like 70%, maybe more even.

Re: The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help

#39

Post by stevenicr » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 9:37 PM UTC

sounds like "Flickr Pro members get ad-free browsing for themselves and their visitors" needs to change.

Certainly you could make it in-obstrusive - just have a non-moving, small one in the header and a a larger in the footer.

Don't have any ads next to the photo.

Kicking the 'adult content' off the platform was the first step in that. This 'we tried to beg for money' letter is a good second step.

Hopefully your AWS infrastructure serves the upcoming ads faster as well.

I was never aware that speed was an issue with flickr. When a place has original content that is not available elsewhere, there is no competition for speed, imho, ymmv.

I can't buy a pro account, my content which was public on flickr for years, became against the TOS when smug bought it.

There were several marginalized community groups there that never transitioned as a whole either.

Sad, it could of become the social network better than fbook.

Re: The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help

#40

Post by kwhitefoot » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 11:16 PM UTC

The problem for me is that if I am just using it to archive or back up my photos then they are asking for more money per year than it would cost me to simply buy more local disk space and make a local backup. Most of the photos I have (had) there are private so they incur essentially zero bandwidth charges.

It seems to me that such a system should benefit from economies of scale so that a year's subscription should at least be cheaper than buying local storage.

So it's back to Google Photos for unlimited storage of reduced resolution copies and 15 GB of general storage (enough for over twenty thousand full resolution pictures from my Moto G5+).