CNET’s AllYouCanUpload Is Disruptive

looks like a decent service, but it cant compete with imageshack just yet.

[url]http://www.playpacman.net[/url]

Where is the business model?

Sounds attractive, but I don’t immediately see how or whether they expect to profit (directly, anyway). Perhaps some may hesitate to use the service, believing the terms will change and they may lose hosting for lots of posted images. Clarifying this may help them.

Gabe, that’s a good point. A clear statement from CNET on their intentions would be great.

Mike, this looks great. And I agree on the focus. Clean and straight forward. My TypePad doesn’t actually give me an easy way to refer to online images, which I think needs to be rectified.

With the ads, there are ads when you go and view a picture. I got a horizontal banner and a vertical banner.

It’s also interesting that they let anyone looking at the pic get all the URL’s to it as well.

http://zapr.typepad.com/michae.....n_upl.html

it will force PhotoBucket and Imageshack to rethink their offerings

Huh? I missed the part where PhotoBucket charges to upload photos. To me AllYouCanUpload is the same service, minus the advertising supported business model which makes me wonder if it will be around next year.

This kind of service isn’t free, there’s bandwidth costs, server costs, and also CNet will have to hire reviewers to sift through thousands of photos to see if there are any inappropriate ones or ones with licensing issues.

This will truely be disruptive if they move away from just photos and to files of any sort, which will make for a great way to mirror the maven jar file repository.

BlogReader,

Photobucket charges for premium accounts - http://photobucket.com/upgrade.php

The premium account gives you unlimited bandwidth, there are still limits on storage and file size. Imageshack also has limitations.

Looks like a category killer to me, with a volume-driven ad revenue model. I hope it goes economic for them and doesn’t end up getting killed off after bleeding red for a few years.

I don’t get it. Why is this disruptive? Type in “image uploader” in google and you’ll have 5.39 million or so solutions for you to upload a file somewhere.

imageshack.us
ihostphotos.com
photobucket.com
putfile.com
suploads.com

Get away from the commercial side and you can easily find thousands of PHP uploader scripts that you can install.

What’s so damn special about this? Just because it’s easy?

Joe, show me a company with this feature set and cost and I’ll agree with you. It doesn’t exist. Well, now it does.

If the criteria is 1. zero cost, 2. no bandwidth cap, 3. no picture limit, and 4. ease of use: then http://www.supload.com/AboutUs will satisfy all 4.

If you want to argue that the interface isn’t clean enough or simple enough, that seems somewhat moot considering if need be, plenty of sites can redesign.

This is a helpful service , uploads in SECONDS - and the resizing options were great.

However if you do register, you can have access to the URLS if you forget them

This will save on bandwidth - lets hope they add VIDEO and Flash
uploading as an option in the future.

I think what’s “disruptive” about it is that it not only has the features people want (no limits namely), but it also is from a company that can deliver. A quick Google search might find a site that claims this and that, but I trust that CNET can actually do it. Even if it starts getting a huge amount of traffic.

The business model is clearly advertising on the image pages. That’s not very hard to figure out.

I just did some checking on AdBrite and thought I would share–image/file hosting sites are some of the most trafficked sites to sell text links:

RapidShare.de - Over 14.4M page views per *day*
ImageVenue.com - Over 7M pvpd
ImageShack.us - Over 3.5M pvpd
MegaUpload.com - Over 3.4M pvpd
PutFile.com - Over 2.9M pvpd (taken from their media kit, not AdBrite)
Uploading.com - Over 480K pvpd

Personally I had never heard of any of those besides ImageShack.us, which wasn’t even close to the most popular. The moral of the story here is that there is a ton of traffic awaiting companies that can figure out how to scale file uploading services. Most of the sites on that list are horrible looking and loaded with ads. But they work.

C/net is a well-known technological website with impeccable reputation. I don’t think anybody will be afraid of storing their photos there. The business model is keeping users within their domain reading their other related sites. The more eyeballs they have captive, looking at their ads, the more revenue they can get from advertisers. Heavy traffic is the name of the game.

I think it’s a pretty neat idea and means that C/net is expanding its reach to other applications. Who are the winners? All of us of course.

I wonder how they are supporting the unlimited bandwidth. You could use AllYouCanUpload with a stenography program like http://steghide.sourceforge.net/index.php to represent any data as an image file. Write a quick wrapper script and you’ve got free infinite storage. Better than Amazon A9’s Storage Service!

Hmmm…

I don’t think I will be moving all my stuff from my present Photo Hosting site to this one just because of the few added features… I’m happy with who I got and maybe I’d use this one for things like Cartoons & Family stuff that I post on forums…

I’m sure down the road there will come a time when it has to be a *pay for use service* to cover expenses just like everything else…

AOL Photos, pictures.aol.com , has unlimited photoupload, keeps the original size, good for backup, you can upload ALL of your picture files, with no changes to the file. They just don’t advertise it. Try it, you’ll like it, the interface just isn’t as easy as flickr. Happy uploading.

Mike,
There is no such thing as free.
Terms and Conditions
#2
When you post Content to Webshots you choose whether to make that Content “Public” (meaning that such Content will be included in our Community section and will be available and searchable to anyone who visits the Webshots site) or “Private” (meaning that such Content will be available only to those who have been given the URL address for such photos and will not be indexed or searchable in the Community section of Webshots). By posting Public or Private Content to Webshots you grant Webshots, its affiliates and partners a
worldwide,
irrevocable,
royalty-free,
nonexclusive,
sub licensable license to use,
reproduce,
create derivative works of,
distribute,
publicly perform,
publicly display,
transfer,
transmit,
distribute and publish that Content for the purposes of displaying that Content on Webshots.
In addition, when you post Public Content to Webshots, you also grant us a license to distribute that Content, either electronically or via other media, to users seeking to download it through the Webshots Desktop or for purposes of other services provided by Webshots and to display such Content on Webshots affiliated sites, including but not limited to other sites owned and operated by CNET. This license shall apply to the distribution and the storage of Your Content in any form, medium, or technology now known or later developed.

You may remove Content you have posted on Webshots at any time. When you do remove your Content, the license described above will automatically expire.

The license agreement is enough to give them total control of your images, whether or not you take down the ‘original’.

The business model is them creating a free library of images at little or no cost.

Harddrives are cheap enough to keep your images under your control.

you can easily find thousands of PHP uploader scripts that you can install.

Even thinking this is a valid part of an argment illustrates how you miss the point. We’re talking mass-market here, not a tool for developers.

Is this just a model then to sucker people into freely giving up their content for an entity to make money off the masses, like the new buzzword crowdsourcing?

Do individuals care that their minor contributions to communities can make money for the community rather than the individuals? Could it be that we do believe in greater goods?

At http://www.idahofallz.com we are trying that now.

It would be cool if they added a snipurl feature to cut down the url length. Just for slow loading purposes and I get annoyed with long urls. That’s just my pet-peeve.

AllYouCanUpload.com/dog-name-pic.

hey mike, talking of simple web apps that do 1 thing well.. have you seen the priceheat bookmarklet?

http://www.priceheat.com

http://www.tagworld.com ….no need for imageuploaders, and it fit’s joe’s aforementioned 4 criteria

Moast (http://www.moast.com/) has been doing pretty much the same thing for a while. No need to register, just upload a photo and they give you the URL. You can register for additional features.

Gabe,
Good question on our intention to keep the liberal terms – that is our intention - that the images are safe on allyoucanupload.com. If we ever needed to change our terms from today’s terms for any reason, we’d likely apply those new terms to photos uploaded only *after* we communicated those new terms. I’ll post something on Allyoucanupload as soon as we can run it by our attorney.

Alan,
Your question about the license and the user’s control over their images is understandable. My answer is a little wordy – sorry but your issue is an extremely important one. We do not take control from the user over *their* photos.

Since people want to use their photos in a variety of ways we need a single license that gives us the ability to do that for them. Example: creating a thumbnail, full size, reformatted sizes to fit screens, download to mobile, screensaver, post thumbnail to blog, thumbnail showing up in our open search API. Our uber licence covers our ability to do that for our users.

The reuse to other CNET owned sites covers our ability to put together a list of member generated photos such as we did for member photos of the locations of the Da Vinci Code. http://www.webshots.com/collec.....nci_0.html

With respect to your ultimate control:
“You may remove Content you have posted on Webshots at any time. When you do remove your Content, the license described above will automatically expire.”
That’s self explanatory. Nothing sinister. Upload your photos, share them, and if they’re good, we’ll feature them. Remove them from our service, you take your photos back and our license to your photos expires.

Andrew,
Good call on the snipurl feature – that’s a good simple feature - the urls are too long. Together with Mike’s suggestion of email of links, that will go on the dev list.

All comments, questions and suggestions are very valuable to me. Thank you.

I use imageshack on a regular basis.
The length of time it took me to upload one picture there, was almost the same time it took me to upload 4 pictures on allyoucanpload.

Mike, I agree with you totally on your last paragraph.
For me applications like that make life easy.
This one is definitely a useful service.

Thanks Michael. I just used it in my site and it’s actually the first time I used such a service. My bandwidth is growing fast and I have been removing and minimizing images ever since and now I just plugged two in a post.

Yah but there’s a downside when they decide to scrap it altogether. Well, at least I get to learn of such a service and paying a few bucks to free me from big bandwidth makes sense.

I will also check out other paid services mentioned in the comments since security of files is very important.

No ads, no premium services. How will they make money?

Wow - this is a great service.
I’ve just added it as an option to PXN8. Now non-flickr users have a way of storing their edited photos permanently online.
Nice one.

—
Joe, show me a company with this feature set and cost and I’ll agree with you. It doesn’t exist. Well, now it does.
—

Hi Mike!

LifeLogger’s new lease on life since early this year may just fit the bill

Share, Connect and Blog on-the-go

Hosting:
Free. Unlimited. 150mb per file upload.

Multiple upload channels for your audio, video, photos, blog entries & bookmarks:
Email your entries in
Use Nokia Lifeblog
Use our Flash uploader
Use MMS and mobile email clients from your phone
Use Google Picasa
Use Native Windows OS uploader
Use our web uploader

http://www.lifelogger.com
Live it. Log it. Repeat.

Thanks for Techcrunch btw. Its my daily dose amidst the rest of the noise out there.

Probably it is a model what I called “crash and burn”. Get as much marketing/promotion as possible through word of mouth. Kill the service and serve through with their normal Webshots service.

I just love it when someone randomly comes in here asking, “Where is the business model?” If they don’t know, then they’re unlikely to even know what to do with the answer.

Is everyone a VC? Or do a lot of people simply assume no one is trying to make money? Annoying.

No adverts. No premum service.

How exactly do CNET expect to make money from this? What’s to stop CNET pulling the rug out from this at any time? They definitely need to make their intentions clearer. I wouldn’t be happy using this service for any important images without knowing that it’s around to stay.

Fine for EBay stuff I guess - why pay money to host images, when you can do it for free, and the auctions have an expiry anyway, so who cares if the service deletes your images after a couple of weeks.

Keeping it running is going to require disk space and bandwidth. Lots of it. It’s only time until they need to find some way of charging…

I reckon I’ll just steer clear of this for now.

This might be an interesting method to attract more users to Webshots. The ole’ bait and switch. Or, upgrade.

The only thing this new site has — that imageshack doesn’t — is no image size limit. But then imageshack already let’s you keep your photos in your own space which is not a feature of allyoucanupload.

I’m not sure this is worth getting real excited over.

The content of images I uploaded has been touched.
“bmp” is converted to “jpg”,
the size of uploaded “jpg” file is different with the original one.

M (and others) - there is advertising (as Michael points out) on the landing page if you click through to the image. You can see it working on my blog. The adverts are horrible - but I guess that won’t be an issue for a lot of users. For others, maybe Flickr is a better bet.

My old buddy Robert Goldberg at Ridgelift has this formula:

Gross Profit = (Amortized Lifetime Value of the Customer) – (Customer Acquisition Cost) – (Operating Costs)

I’m curious as to what the “Amortized Lifetime Value of the Customer” is for allyoucanupload.

If my business were handing out $10 bills for free, I’d build a huge audience.

Did you catch Websocket? It has an even more simple lay-out:

http://imagesocket.com/

The website seems to be failing…getting a whole array of different exceptions.
Servlet Exceptions…
Out of Memory…
ClassNotFoundException…

Growing pains.:)

This *is* interesting despite all the lamers wondering what the business model is or pointing out that crapshack.com, et al. have been doing this since the mid-50s.

But I would be a bit concerned about cnet as the provider considering what they did to Download.com which was also once a free service. Cnet also took the fairly incredible mp3.com service and turned it into slop.

I recently sold on an image hosting service I started myself over at http://imgfly.com , the industry is hard to make a profit in, especially as the hosting costs keep rising. Advertising is a pretty solid revenue method but doesn’t compensate for subscription fees.

This new service is SWEET. I will never go back to imageshack or photobucket!

Martin:

You need a small windows app that adds “right click to upload” functionality to all images.

And possibly provides a minimalist drag and drop to upload feature.

This app should not require log-in.

It should store urls for the user.

The homepage is ugly, http://imagesocket.com/ is much nicer.

If you need to let people upload more than one photo at once, you add a script like Gmail’s attachment script which adds as many upload slots as you need, and you urge the download of the above mentioned drag and drop app.

Walter: PXN8 is an amazing program, I’m glad you mentioned it, the addition of the one click publish to allyoucanupload is perfect. (Yes I sound like a shill)

I’m sat here wondering how long it would take to make an image uploader utility that uses the allyoucanupload server, and logs the corresponding IDs for you…

I wonder if they would boot you for uploading a few gig?

it’s not great if they destroy the others and then stop the product because they realize it is a foolish business plan. Then what happens? they replace every photo with an advertisement for CNET? I’m not saying they will do that, but it will be tempting if they start losing money hand-over-fist and need some way to recoup it.

Its really not that hard to understand the business modal.

There are limits to everything, but lets say you were already paying for an unlimited amount of bandwidth. What then would be the additional cost of a service thats primary expense is bandwidth?

Now, there is a certain type of customer that likes free but is willing to pay money to get what they want. So lets say you attract one million customers, and 1% of them are the type of customer thats willing to pay money for an even better service. Now expand that to a global level and you have 100 million customers, even if only 0.5% are willing to pay a few dollars more per month for something better….. it turns into a whole lot of money, or atleast more money than you had before. And not to mention there are ‘loyal’ customers who once they find a service or brand that works for them they remain with it as long as they receive good service even if the prices go up, they want security.

Of course its understandable to point out the service may not last forever, if you don’t get the customers you need to make the service work, as a business you just change the business modal or close shop.

Anyway, just enjoy it while it lasts, knowing it may not last forever.

-Steven

Another photo site — that is free, offers unlimited uploads, and lets you download the entire photos in original size — is AOL Pictures. It also has a great uploader that you can upload a bulk load of photos onto, and you get permalinks so you can embed photos of various sizes to other sites. It’s been free for ages.

(see http://journals.aol.com/aolpictures/AOLPictures and http://pictures.aim.com)

–Will–

I don’t see the business model for photobucket (or being well funded for that matter), how will this work is my question.

Maybe they will just have it as some sort of Webshots cousin?

pwb This *is* interesting despite all the lamers wondering what the business model is or pointing out that crapshack.com, et al. have been doing this since the mid-50s.

Not sure if you’re trolling or not but that gave me a laugh. Lamers wondering about a business model? Yeah that’s for squares man. And who cares if people tried this before and gave up as they couldn’t make money, this time it is so totally different!

StevenC Now expand that to a global level and you have 100 million customers, even if only 0.5% are willing to pay a few dollars more per month for something better

Why stop at 100M? There’s 6B people on the planet. If only 10% of them used your service and of that 1% paid for it that’s 6M paying customers!

I think everyone is jumping on the bandwagon here..

Lest we forget Tinypic which is the non-registered version of Photobucket?
http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....inypic.com

BTW, both Tinypic and Photobucket has video

And both have been around almost 3 years. I think tinypic is also unlimited bandwidth.

There are hundreds of sites with this functionality, most will be gone in months time, but to have performance, uptime and lasting power, I’ll trust my stuff with Photobucket/tinypic.

I wonder what makes the main different between CNET’s AllYouCanUpload and all the other phone hosting service. Except for a anonymous uploading.

http://www.imagesocket.com destroys them

I was put off by the amount of advertising to which a reader is subjected if they click through to the image page. As Ian above commented, “[t]he adverts are horrible.” I was also put off by the fact they usurp the “alt” tags in the image links they provide to slip in yet more advertising, this time for allyoucanupload itself. I agree with you on the “do one thing well” notion, but for my money (free services, heh) flickr is a better bet, even though image hosting is a fraction of what it does and there is registration. That just means allyoucanupload is likely to lose users like me to flickr or some other fix that doesn’t impose such a heavy advertising tax; it doesn’t mean the site won’t find a market among those who don’t care so much about that. They’re smart to target eBay sellers, but bloggers might be more prone to pass it up for these reasons.

Denise, Using Flickr for image hosting isn’t a good idea (although I occasionally do it too). It’s not what Flickr is intended for, and I would be worried that they would shut an account down that abused this. Or simply turn off referrals from myspace, etc. Note their terms and condition:

“Flickr is intended for personal use and is not a generic image hosting service. Professional or corporate uses of Flickr are prohibited.”

i (with lengthy stubborn struggle) signed up for aol hometown, figuring aol has become alt-alt, like driving a trabant. The problems with aol hometown, are that:
the search pulls up almost nothing. (is aol really so huge? i rarely come across anything aol, except newpaper (business section. the paper newspaper!) articles describing how huge aol is.) and as well as i recall, the few resulting pages were vacuous.

if you want to see more than a blank webpage, you have switch off proxo, or figure out what bizarre aol bits (scripts?) are being cleaned.
___________
i’ve never noticed any trouble with imageshack or another host i use that has a multiple-image load form.
i realized i wasn’t THAT desperate to want to put any website visitors through that kind of “ao hell”

[self ed: eh, textarea too small. underscore divider and 2nd to last para/sentence belonged last.]

tried the music match box. common artistes gabriel + dresden (gogle Results 1 - 10 of about 2,970,000), but no match shows on the page.
even allowing cookies isn’t enough to get the site to work.

mouse clicked to http://tagworld.com/-/Pictures.aspx?group=all
tried ‘my pictures’ link. requires registering.

hi sali keo

I don’t get what’s ‘disruptive’ about this. This is the same thing that a bunch of sites (like http://thumbsnap.com ) have been doing forever now.

I think I’ll stick to http://thumbsnap.com .

It’s a great looking (and by that I mean simple) website which goes straight to the most functional state it could possibly be. Two thumbs up from me.

It’s very similar in feel to Imageshack.us
Most users don’t get hit by the bandwidth limit offered there (Imageshack) but I have lost a few images which weren’t accessed for a long time.

The single killer feature allyoucanupload offers is to keep images “forever”, if the user doesn’t violate their T.O.S., bloggers will love this.

The one thing lacking IMO, is an alternative upload interface. FTP and a desktop upload tool (like the one Imageshack offers) would make the service perfect!