Hi Andrew... Interesting theory here, particularly where you say "Personal photos and videos have a small audience, and hence advertising can not monetize their storage." Doesn't the popularity of flickr and its reach suggest the opposite? After all, there is a lot of traffic for some of the pictures -- many which weren't done by professionals. Obviously a huge portion of flickr gets very little traffic, as you suggest, but the nature of their product has allowed a huge community of photo sharing which does prompt a lot of traffic (at least more traffic than the same photos would garner on snapfish or kodak).
I think your theory is true to an extent, but I think that flickr, and to some degree, facebook, have shown that internet social networking tools can increase the amount of traffic a given set of pictures can generate.
Brad
· 1 year ago
But you have to store all of the images that people put up in order to get the .01% that gets any traffic at all. Most of it sits there just taking up storage space. Flickr does a pretty good job of forcing people to pay the $25 annual fee since the severely limited free account is virtually useless.
Andrew Erlichson
· 1 year ago
Exactly right. You have to store all the stuff that gets very little traffic. It also depends on whether you store high resolution originals. And Phanfare is not designed to surface popular media and hence does not attract those who desire a big audience.
But most tellingly, even flickr charges for storage because their reach can't pay to store the bytes.
This all gets better over time as storage costs drop, but it will be a long time before ads can pay to keep all the photos and videos you take throughout your life.
Darryl
· 11 months ago
Also, as far as I know, Facebook doesn't store our original full-sized images, definitely doesn't let you download them back down, and strips the EXIF info. So they're storing much less data than a Phanfare, SmugMug or Flickr, with their multiple renditions of every photo (and for Phanfare/SmugMug, video).
Consider too the precipitous drop in advertising rates (and therefore revenue) due to the recent economic downturn. While advertisers may stop spending on website advertising that has arguably negligible returns, will customers really decide to stop subscribing to a service that has all of their photos and videos safely backed up? I'm thinking no.
All Comments
Interesting theory here, particularly where you say "Personal photos and videos have a small audience, and hence advertising can not monetize their storage." Doesn't the popularity of flickr and its reach suggest the opposite? After all, there is a lot of traffic for some of the pictures -- many which weren't done by professionals. Obviously a huge portion of flickr gets very little traffic, as you suggest, but the nature of their product has allowed a huge community of photo sharing which does prompt a lot of traffic (at least more traffic than the same photos would garner on snapfish or kodak).
I think your theory is true to an extent, but I think that flickr, and to some degree, facebook, have shown that internet social networking tools can increase the amount of traffic a given set of pictures can generate.
But most tellingly, even flickr charges for storage because their reach can't pay to store the bytes.
This all gets better over time as storage costs drop, but it will be a long time before ads can pay to keep all the photos and videos you take throughout your life.
Consider too the precipitous drop in advertising rates (and therefore revenue) due to the recent economic downturn. While advertisers may stop spending on website advertising that has arguably negligible returns, will customers really decide to stop subscribing to a service that has all of their photos and videos safely backed up? I'm thinking no.