I’m fascinated by the economics of image sharing sites. They fill a fundamental need to share images across other platforms but they seem expensive to run and difficult to monetize.
Have there been successful image hosters that weren’t just spending money to capture users in order to sell out or eventually enshitten (imgur, giphy, imageshack)?
Shutterstock is selling prints so it will be interesting to see what they do with giphy.
I remember when Imgur started and they were really nice and seemed to be a low cost (I think only one employee) so they could host barebones without making the experience bad for users (ads, data mining, etc).
I think the promise of giphy was that advertisers would pay for sponsored gifs. So The Voice gets top placement for “wild crowd” gif and then gets shared X,000,000 times in a native way.
It’s a sensible thesis that appears to be invalidated for now.
I agree. It's interesting because nearly all the GIF searches I use on a regular basis are terrible, yet I wouldn't be too perturbed if I were given relevant/funny/interesting GIFs that contained product placement (say, a GIF for "cheers!" might be someone raising a glass of Coke).
I think the problem might be that advertisers can't control context. Someone might say something vile (but legal) on Twitter and get lots of meme GIFs in the replies that advertisers would be very unhappy about, and it's a more direct connection than having your sponsored tweet appear in the chain.
A gif sharing service could provide code to the big embedders (ie. twitter, facebook, whatsapp) which scans for bad words and phrases and decides if a particular gif is to be suggested for posting in that particular conversation. If the conversation isn't advertiser suitable, the user just gets to choose from mundane non-branded gifs.
That should be enough to satisfy most brand advertisers.
That reminds me of how unnaturally “Baby Yoda” spread. They show it one time and suddenly it was all over Reddit (which didn’t shock me, they’re the textbook example of consumer), Giphy, Imgur, etc. Including scenes that hadn’t been revealed yet.
I can only imagine that Disney put some big bucks into advertising to help pivot the SW IP away from the sequel trilogy before additionally pushing hard on their streaming service.
I also imagine Disney made far, far, far more money from any deals with Giphy than Giphy got from Disney. Hence why they’re being thrown around like a stuffed toy.
I think giphy more tried to play the analytics tracking angle. They made it prohibitively difficult to right click > copy .gif url from their site seemingly so they could control sharing through trackable means
Right. the reason why Facebook wanted Giphy was because they can use that to track users and develop deeper profiles to better sell ads to corporations. eg User searches for "drink", and chooses from a picture of Coca Cola or Pepsi, but chooses Pepsi. Coca Cola'll pay to advertise to current Pepsi drinkers.
Advertising within the seller doesn't help "the ecosystem". (auditing, Ad networks, clearing house, more auditing, nsa-ish, etc)
If facebook kept it and integrated on whatsapp (their only upward active user product) then they would sell ads there and that's it.
With them forced to sell to a 3rd party, now that 3rd party will have to offer reverse auctions like every other publisher. Everyone will get their sweet stream of user profiles and "the ecosystem" will be happy. It is very much not invalidated now.
Just remember the prices for AWS, CloudFlare, and GCP are for application software. Raw bandwidth are a lot cheaper when it comes to content focused CDNs and dedicated hosting.
And this is exactly where IPFS makes sense for me. As long as the community wants something to exist it can exist for free. If only you want it to exist, host it. When you no longer care, it will exist until no one hosts it anymore.
If this were the only option, I bet most people would realize how much of the web really doesn't benefit them in any meaningful way, but merely gets used because it's there, and can be removed from their lives with minimal grief
Shutterstock is selling images with license (!), that's certainly a more stable business model than "crowd-sourced image-hosting".
Giphy seems to become a advertising platform itself, with advertisers using it as part of viral campaigns (i.e. have related gifs available when launching a movie), although I doubt that created alot of revenue so far.
That said, it's striking how well-embedded giphy is across a huge amount of messaging platforms, which is likely their biggest asset today...
Shutterstock and Getty are both well positioned to sell pre-trained (on their own data, natch) generative models to customers, who can then fine-tune with their own datasets. I think the market for "pretrained models with guaranteed no IP issues" is going to be lucrative. Maybe not enough digits to excite VCs, but more than enough to make up for a decrease in demand for stock images.
> "pretrained models with guaranteed no IP issues"
The problem is that even if Shuttertock train model on the images they routinely sell it doesn't mean it's going to be free from IP issue. The subtleties are going to vary widely between jurisdiction, but it's not like Shutterstock was the author of most of the images in its bank: most if not all the pictures there have been taken by third party photographers, who (at least in some jurisdictions) keep the entirety of the copyright over their creation. So if court ends up ruling that images generated by ML models trained on copyrighted material is plagiarism, then Shutterstock will be plagiarizing their own suppliers.
Then maybe now their contract terms include a license to do so, but I'm pretty sure their old contracts did not, and even now, the said contract has to be ruled valid by a court.
In the US, where the big international players are, the legislator will probably shape the law in their favor (and against the photographers), but in many countries, where photographers are the actual business and where Shutterstock and others are just foreign service provider, the legislator can be tempted to protect the local businesses against Sutterstock.
It's going to be a mess in the next few decades (but IP has always been a mess, that's what happen when you artificially construct an exclusive “property right” out of something immaterial: intellectual property is trying to get a square peg in a round hole)
Was curious as well, so I looked up their last investor report. In 2022 they had 24% profit growth, with $32.8m on $215.3m revenue.
They invest alot in AI image generation as well, and already offer a commercial product.
For their big customers their product might be the best of both worlds: AI-generated images based on prompts, with full legal clearance on use.
I doubt a marketing department of i.e. HP wants to risk a legal dispute about some image they used because it was generated by a model which was trained on unlicensed content.
Once this scenario is legally solid though....yes, I wonder how well Shutterstock will do...
I'm sure its been done (I'm guessing many times) but my thought would be to have a free service that auto watermarks all images with the image hosts domain name and upsell a paid account that doesn't watermark images. If you get 0.01% paid and keep costs low by shopping around for CDNs I think it could be a good "lifestyle" business as long as you had some kind of auto moderation system.
WhatsApp used to charge $1/year before the Meta acquisition. If you could convince people to pay $3/GB, that'd be enough to front the content with Cloudflare and store the data in the Internet Archive forever. Still need to solve the moderation problem, but it isn't impossible.
If people are paying to host the material, isn't what they host on them?
You could even have a lawyer add something like, "You are purchasing hosting rights for yourself and therefore take all responsibility for what you host. We will work with any relevant government authorities whose jurisdiction you are under to provide them information of your activities on this service if the products you provide violate local, state, or federal laws. You agree to post nothing illegal and if you violate that you agree to own all responsibility, legal, personal, or financial, for your posted materials... blah blah blah"
And then submit everything posted to csam scanners.
> We will work with any relevant government authorities blah blah blah
the problem is that costs money. you either pay the staff to do the moderation at upload, or you pay the staff to handle all the various governments that come after you. either way it's expensive, but dealing with the government's lawyers is probably more expensive. and no, just running through a CSAM scanner isn't nearly enough.
Shutterstock sells stock photos. They have an excellent inventory and good prices and I've bought plenty from them in the past for web projects.
But.. their business just went down the plughole with the advent of text-to-image AI. Now you can get pretty much exactly the image you needed without having to spend hours trawling through pre-made photographs.
And it's extremely funny since most of these text to image models were container Shutterstock watermarked images, to the point it thinks humans see the world with a big shutterstock watermark across it with certain prompts.
Microstock was certainly a mini-rage for a while. All the photographers I knew who played with it got out pretty quickly. There was very little money in it (I played a very little and don't think I ever sold anything.) and a lot of classic stock photography of people requires model release forms.
There's always speculative value because some executive somewhere thinks they can turn it around and make it profitable. So it can keep being flipped across different owners. It can go infinitely because the cash comes from elsewhere.
it's essentially just burning through VC money to provide free image hosting. every time the funders start trying to make their money back, somebody will start a new free image host funded by a new batch of suckers.
My guess is that someone will eventually end up creating a bootstrapped lifestyle business, similar to craigslist.
Assuming they don’t encrappen it, and there’s some tangential thing they can charge a nominal fee for that rides their network effects, they’ll have a lasting business that will provide ~5-10 people with comfortable income indefinitely.
I don't remember all the details but imgur used to have some pretty strict limits. iirc you could only upload 250 images on a free account?
I was wrong. It was worse. 75 was the limit for free users. I think I never reached the limit until they upped it to 225.
> In order to get ready for upcoming features, the number of recent images a regular user can have in his/her account has been raised from 75 to 225. Keep in mind that you will still be able to upload more if you go over the limit, it’s just that the older images will be hidden from the account (not deleted!). This is great news, because now you can create even more albums and share all your images at once.
> Also, imgur pro accounts have just been made cheaper! A 1 year imgur subscription is now cheaper than any other comparable photo service, including Flickr, Photobucket and ImageShack. With imgur pro, not only is there no limit to the amount of images you can have in your account, there is absolutely no compression, and your images are not modified in any way if they are under 5MB in size.
that was only ever a restriction if you were trying to upload images to your profile and direct people to your profile to see the images you've uploaded. which isn't a thing i've ever wanted to do.
if you were just using it as a image host for sharing images on other sites, it worked perfectly fine without an account. now they've crippled that functionality because they want to make money.
Not a general pure image sharing site, but one dedicate for wallpapers (and more) for your personal device (ie your phone), but Zedge did/still provides sharing UGC (user generated content) and as well a premium service for artists.
They are in the margins of positive income at least last I checked.
Have there been successful image hosters that weren’t just spending money to capture users in order to sell out or eventually enshitten (imgur, giphy, imageshack)?
Shutterstock is selling prints so it will be interesting to see what they do with giphy.
I remember when Imgur started and they were really nice and seemed to be a low cost (I think only one employee) so they could host barebones without making the experience bad for users (ads, data mining, etc).