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Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos

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Re: Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos

#151

Post by benbataille »

bad_user wrote: post #132
54mf wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Do you really think your measly $25/year cover for their expenses with you?" Actually, yes. Hard drive space is incredibly cheap, especially at their scale. My photos aren't terribly popular, so they aren't using much bandwidth either. I probably cost them $5-10/year, tops. In fact, I'm probably one of the majority, the ones who subsidize the heavy, uber-popular users with tens of thousands of followers who upload h…

> 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 th…

>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.

Re: Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos

#152

Post by jaredcwhite »

I'm beginning to adopt a "I don't sign up for your service/social network if you don't know how to make money other than sell me someday" mindset because I'm sick of being burned. First the Twitter debacle, and now this. Instagram should be inspired by App.net, not Twitter. Sorry guys, I'm canceling my account. Flickr is starting to show signs of promise as a decent photo service again, and I'll happily pay them money for a Pro account.

Buh bye Instagram. Hope that ad thing works out for you. (Not.)

Re: Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos

#153

Post by bad_user »

hieronymusN wrote: post #141
bad_user wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Flickr you're still the product unfortunately, although Flickr is much better than other similar services in this regard. Do you really think your measly $25/year cover for their expenses with you? Seriously, if you don't want to be the product, organize those photos in a standard directory structure and synchronize it either with Dropbox or Google Drive or SkyDrive. The downside of doing that is that storage is…

I think that my $25 will keep Flickr/Yahoo from pulling the same shenanigans Instagram currently is (I've been using Flickr since 2006, just went Pro today). And for that $25 I get a hell of a lot more features than Instagram ever provided (privacy, API, full size photos, etc). All my photos are stored on my phone or hard drive, Flickr is just for sharing. Seriously.

Oh, definitely, it's much better than Instagram and through its features (like creative-commons license statements and discovery based on those licenses) Flickr is actually providing a service that benefits the open web and all of us.

I was just saying though ... if you need to store your photos somewhere where they are readily available, choose general-purpose cloud storage, not Flickr, not Google+ or Picasa, or whatever else "photo sharing" service exists out there.

Leave Flickr and the likes of that for a "curated" photo stream of carefully chosen photos that you want to publish to the whole world and never trust their privacy settings.

Re: Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos

#154

Post by shardling »

MattBearman wrote: post #81

I was about to delete my Instagram account when I saw this, but having given it a bit of thought, I'm actually ok with it. Instagram needs to get money from somewhere, and as far as I'm concerned selling my photos is preferable to filling the feeds with ads. However I can see how for a lot of people they'd rather have ads then have their photos sold (especially pro photographers) so it'll be interesting to see how ma…

As pointed out elsewhere, it's more than a little weird that they could use pictures you took of your friends. Even if the chance is incredibly small, I'm not ok with that.

And since it's not worth the hassle of constantly being mindful of what I'm uploading, I'm going to delete my account. Which is a pity, since Instagram's photo app seems to do a lot of nice automatic color balancing compared to the native Android app. :(

Re: Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos

#155

Post by mcguire »

If we assume that the good folks at Instagram (or at least their lawyers and public relations people) are not complete idiots, then they have no intention of actually following through with this change. Here's a prediction: it will be dropped due to "user feedback" or some such in a week or so and everyone will have a warm, fuzzy feeling.

The question is, what do they actually want to accomplish by floating this trial balloon?

Re: Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos

#157

Post by bad_user »

benbataille wrote: post #151
bad_user wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

>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 tot…

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.

Re: Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos

#158

Post by papsosouid »

bad_user wrote: post #108
hieronymusN wrote: post #106

I fully understand that with a free product, I am the product. I go into that with eyes open, and happily used Instagram assuming they would eventually start serving ads near the photos, promoting photos or similar. However, using my photos as ads seems a bit of a stretch. So, I just happily gave Flickr $25 after deleting my Instagram account. Some things are worth paying for, because sometimes I don't want to be the…

With Flickr you're still the product unfortunately, although Flickr is much better than other similar services in this regard. Do you really think your measly $25/year cover for their expenses with you? Seriously, if you don't want to be the product, organize those photos in a standard directory structure and synchronize it either with Dropbox or Google Drive or SkyDrive. The downside of doing that is that storage is…

>Do you really think your measly $25/year cover for their expenses with you?

That is WAY more than they need to cover expenses. Storing and serving static content is very cheap.

Re: Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos

#159

Post by mnicole »

jonknee wrote: post #142
untog wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Instagram has a huge audience. Google+ might be a better place for the photos, but it doesn't have an audience.

Google+ has a significantly larger audience than Instagram. G+ is more than photos though and has a different audience.

That would have possibly been true before the Facebook acquisition, but once the sale went through, I got about 20-30 new requests from people that were on FB but not Instagram, and I'm not even remotely popular. I can't say the FB to G+ conversion I saw (amongst non-techies) was as strong.

You're also not accounting for the fact that Instagram is a mobile app with a single focus. I don't want to go into my G+ app and filter by photos and hope to get the same quickly-see-what-my-friends-are-up-to experience I can with Instagram, just like I wouldn't post those kinds of photos to G+ to begin with. It's a very informal platform and I don't think G+ comes close to replicating that experience.

Re: Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos

#160

Post by pdonis »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #64

Presumably Instagram would not have the right to sell photos from people that restrict the viewing of their photos in public. I have my profile set up so only those people I "approve" to follow me can see them.

The language in the TOS says "you can control who can view certain of your Content and activities on the Service". Note that key qualifier: on the Service. It does not say that you can control who can view your Content by other means; so if they sold your photos to someone else who made them viewable through some other means, you can't control that. At least, that's the way I read it; IANAL.
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