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Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service?

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Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service?

#41

Post by callmeed »

I think it really depends on if you're talking about a completely consumer/snapshot sharing service that is free. If so, I would say "no". Facebook and Flickr dominate and (to my knowledge) neither make money solely on their photo services. (Facebook's only revenue is ads and I doubt Flickr's Pro account covers the cost of the entire service).

If you're talking about a premium/freemium service that is targeted at pro-sumers, then maybe. SmugMug and others (myself included) have shown that it can be done profitably. It's just that with a paid service, you reduce your market considerably (no one wants to pay to upload their halloween party pictures).

But I think there are new markets to explore for paid services. Just depends on who you're trying to reach.

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service?

#42

Post by sokoloff »

anamax wrote: post #30
sokoloff wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think the user tolerance for paying to host large images would be? Obviously bandwidth and storage cost money, and if a site is to allow 4x larger photos (driving 4x larger costs), the site needs to make 4x more money somehow. Page views and ads and referral arrangements to photo printers aren't going to automatically scale with photo sizes for a free site.

> if a site is to allow 4x larger photos (driving 4x larger costs), the site needs to make 4x more money somehow Not so fast. Bandwidth and storage needs scale roughly with resolution, but other costs scale more slowly or even not at all. Note that even storage (and to a lesser extend bandwidth) has a per-action cost that does not depend (much) on resolution. And, storage costs include meta data, which doesn't scale…

I realize that 4x increase in pixels doesn't mean 4x increase in the file size, but I was discussing in terms of filesize. Unless you have absolutely insanely higher metadata stored per image than we do, your metadata probably amounts to under 2.5% of the image data for hypothesized 2MB files, so maybe 2.05 goes to 10.05 which is basically still a 400% increase. Part of the metadata is on fast (DB) disk, so your costs don't scale absolutely linearly, but bulk cold disk is still scaling up 4x.

To a large extent, I have worked through it for our application (I run IT for a top 100 e-commerce site that does a very substantial amount of uploads in the holiday season; we choose to self-host several dozen TB and have an emergency overflow possibility out to S3 if we fill up our in-house storage).

I can't see how storage costs are meaningfully sub-linear, and bandwidth costs can be due to bulk pricing, but are still first-approximation linear with upload size. (You might argue that you can use 95/5 pricing to work around that by forcing users to schedule their uploads for an off-peak time, but then you could do that in the base case as well.)

I would love to hear more about your surprises in the model, either on HN or privately, as this represents a substantial portion of my budget, and if I'm missing something, I'm not too proud to change course. :)

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service?

#43

Post by anamax »

sokoloff wrote: post #42
anamax wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if a site is to allow 4x larger photos (driving 4x larger costs), the site needs to make 4x more money somehow Not so fast. Bandwidth and storage needs scale roughly with resolution, but other costs scale more slowly or even not at all. Note that even storage (and to a lesser extend bandwidth) has a per-action cost that does not depend (much) on resolution. And, storage costs include meta data, which doesn't scale…

I realize that 4x increase in pixels doesn't mean 4x increase in the file size, but I was discussing in terms of filesize. Unless you have absolutely insanely higher metadata stored per image than we do, your metadata probably amounts to under 2.5% of the image data for hypothesized 2MB files, so maybe 2.05 goes to 10.05 which is basically still a 400% increase. Part of the metadata is on fast (DB) disk, so your cost…

[I can't find an e-mail address in your profile or the blog that it mentions.]

I was going with 4x file size and assumed that bandwidth for images is linear in file size, aka no bulk discounts.

One of my points is that IOs have a cost too, a cost that is largely independent of file size.

To first approximation, disk IO capacity is proportional to the number of disks. (Yes, some disks, especially the flash ones, support a lot more IOs/sec than others.) If you're IOs bound, you either have spare disk space or can probably increase the amount of disk space at a sublinear price. (1.5TB drives are For some data transfers, AWS has a "per operation" charge in addition to a bandwidth charge. The latter is proportional to file size but the former is not.

My application has a lot of processing costs. Most of them are on metadata, not the images, so they don't grow with image size. I also do a lot of stuff with "thumbed" images - producing them is a function of file size but storing them and moving them around isn't.

My model is different from yours in at least two ways.

(1) I'm estimating some things.

(2) I'm using AWS and GAE prices. (I'm assuming the highest prices because if my app is getting enough use that I'm getting bulk discounts, I've got other problems.)

If I had a model that tracked my actual experience, I wouldn't listen to some bozo on a website....

FWIW, data in a db is significantly larger than the actual data.

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service?

#44

Post by pclark »

whatusername wrote: post #40
greyman wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> blissfully unaware of fb? Yes, indeed. I have a few friends who use fb and after some time they tend to think that "everyone is on the facebook". ;-) But actually not. There are many more people who don't know what fb is, or they don't use it.

oh absolutely agree that not everyone is on facebook.. (for example - all my younger cousins are only on myspace :P) (Also - I'm coming from Aus - where fb is #2 after google ahead of youtube, myspace, ebay, etc -- so my sample size may be biased..) My point wasn't that there aren't millions of internet users who aren't on facebook - it's that there aren't millions of internet users who WOULD BE INTERESTED IN SHARING…

are you insane? Why do you think most people take photos? To remember and share memories.

How do you think most users of digital cameras share photos? via email? Print them out? You know, and I know those two methods are rubbish.

Even if there isn't millions of users - you'd only need a few thousand to get your startup rocking.

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service?

#45

Post by sokoloff »

anamax wrote: post #43
sokoloff wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realize that 4x increase in pixels doesn't mean 4x increase in the file size, but I was discussing in terms of filesize. Unless you have absolutely insanely higher metadata stored per image than we do, your metadata probably amounts to under 2.5% of the image data for hypothesized 2MB files, so maybe 2.05 goes to 10.05 which is basically still a 400% increase. Part of the metadata is on fast (DB) disk, so your cost…

[I can't find an e-mail address in your profile or the blog that it mentions.] I was going with 4x file size and assumed that bandwidth for images is linear in file size, aka no bulk discounts. One of my points is that IOs have a cost too, a cost that is largely independent of file size. To first approximation, disk IO capacity is proportional to the number of disks. (Yes, some disks, especially the flash ones, suppo…

OK Thanks. Couple comments:

Our bulk storage disk sees very little in the way of IOPS-requested. (An entire Gbps pipe couldn't fill the IO capacity of 4U of the 1TB SATA drives we use for bulk upload storage, and we have way more than that. ;) ) DB and hosts disks are another story entirely, and I have to admit that we don't really account for all those costs as "upload related" (by and large, they are not upload-driven) so we have some model inaccuracy there as well, but for every 2MB file we have on SATA, we probably have 20-40K in thumbnails on faster disk and well under 1K in fairly narrow, and not heavily indexed DB rows on 2 tables.

As for listening to a bozo on website...well, HN is by and large not bozo-filled, it was pretty clear you weren't one, had given some thought to this problem, and I'm more than ready to admit when I'm potentially able to learn from someone else something that might save me/my company money.

It does sound like your app has substantial sub-linear cost components, and I admit ours has some smaller ones as well but that we just don't model them tightly enough to see those components.

Thanks for the info, and I wish you the best in your endeavor(s).

Re: Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service?

#47

Post by AlanEdge »

catone wrote: post #14

My buddy Allen Stern (of CenterNetworks) said something recently in a podcast that I liked and is relevant here. Paraphrasing, he said something like, "In New York City there are a thousand pizza places and new ones opening up all the time. Many of them are successful and some of the new ones will be, too." Or, in other words, there is always room for new startups that do the same thing. Just do it better or differen…

There is always room for new startups to do the same thing, but in consumer internet it typically requires a drastically different angle because network effects and switching costs kick in (whereas it does not for a single pizza parlor).

This is why Friendster was forced to focus on China and give up hope in US.

YouTube's competitors had a hard time moving in on mass-consumer video (they were forced to go white label or focus on businesses, monetization, or analytics) due to the push-pull effect of YouTube's entrenched publisher-viewer community (and their network effect of widgets scattered across the web).

Kijiji positioned dramatically different than Craigslist (100% ad supported and much better UI) and it was seeded with a different audience (all the inactive eBay users were spammed giving it overnight critical mass).

SmugMug does a terribly good job and its not clear what angle you would take in entering their market. They have scale (300K paying users) and killer customer support (which is critical for their target customer who typically lacks technical expertise) and can outprice folks looking to replicate their offering with a significant incremental improvement to their service.

What angles to entering the photo-sharing market do you folks see?

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