SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill, who has said “maybe I just don’t get this ‘Web 2.0′ term” in the past, is proceeding to teach those of us who claim to know exactly what it means a thing or two. The company launched a suite of stunning new features tonight.
SmugMug, which took its first customers in late 2002, is the go-to service for serious photography nuts. 100,000 paying customers have uploaded over 100 million photos. The company has 19 employees, is profitable, and has never taken outside funding. Revenues are in the $10 million per year range, MacAskill tells me.
There is no free version of the service. People pay a minimum of $40 per year to upload photos to the site. Pro accounts, which are $150/year, give photographers a number of tools to add watermarks, and sell downloads as well as prints of their work. The higher level accounts also allow customers to use templates, fully customize the look and feel of their albums (or “galleries” as SmugMug calls them), and even use their own domain names.
The site has most of the sharing and community features of the prototypical Web 2.0 company, Flickr. RSS feeds, tags, comments, a public API, etc. Yahoo, Flickr’s parent company, meets with the SmugMug team regularly and the Yahoo user interface team has recently sung the praises of SmugMug on a Yahoo blog. For many (but not all) serious photographers, SmugMug is simply a more powerful way to show their photos.
SmugMug has also become the poster child for Amazon’s S3 storage service, famously claiming to save at least $500,000 per year by switching.
New SmugMug Features
SmugMug launched a number of new features and architectural changes tonight that come close to constituting a complete relaunch – 95% of SmugMug’s page views are affected.
The key change is the complete re-writing of the photo viewing interface from HTML (with some Ajax components bolted on) to dynamic javascript. Clicking among pictures no longer requires a page refresh at all, speeding site navigation significantly and not bringing people back up to the top of the page after clicking on a new photo.
And like Yahoo Maps, SmugMug has gone through the painstaking process of updating URLs as people navigate the site. This is a problem that plagues Rich Internet Applications. Without a page refresh when navigating a Flash or Ajax application, the URL doesn’t update. SmugMug has solved that problem, even for Safari (which Yahoo still hasn’t solved).
SmugMug has also moved user comments to the same page as the photo (saving a click), and moved most of the metadata and photo options from the display area into a fly-out drawer. The effect is to highlight the photo content, but not clutter the page with lots of data and links.
SmugMug’s Future
MacAskill says he’s approached “constantly” by venture capitalists and potential acquirors. But his plan is to keep running the profitable company without outside interference. He wants to keep providing the best product for professional photographers, he says, and has no plans to sell out. That, of course, will just make those VCs and suitors want SmugMug even more.
Is SmugMug a “Web 2.0″ company? Yes, in almost every way…but you won’t hear MacAskill admit it. Not anytime soon, anyway.
Now that’s a nice niche. $40 minimum to upload photos??? What I want to know is, “how much is their net profit?”
I should write a little profile on them too…
Best photo site around and whats more – they really REALLY care about their users. They stay profitable while being a fantastic team as well.
I hope they continue to thrive and really lead the “best-of-the-best” photo-sharing site their is.
For now its photos, but i’m hanging for when they integrate video………lets hope its not too far away!!!!!!!
Alex
$ 40 min to upload, why pay that much, with that kind of annual payment a decent website and webspace can be bought.
Thats right, but this Website is more than just storage of pics. It´s the service that cost 40$.
$40 includes unlimited diskspace and good amount of bandwidth/month for hobbyist photographer, access to print facility, etc. And you do not have to write your own pages.
This is not for geeks that want to write their own pages, manage their own website, etc. Its for photographers that do not want the hassle of managing a website. You only need to manages your photos.
Check out the full list of features and compare that with other offers (blank diskspace)
@Marc:
Actually, with this release, it includes unlimited bandwidth along with unlimited storage. We just haven’t updated all the marketing pages yet.
Good points, though. Thanks!
Actually, in page #5 of their tour they mention the “power of Web 2.0″
“Is SmugMug a “Web 2.0″ company? Yes, in almost every way…but you won’t hear MacAskill admit it. Not anytime soon, anyway.”
Ummm, you should probably tell MacAskill that it says “Cool Web 2.0 features” on http://www.smugmug.com/price/
I love reading about successful Web companies that charge for their service. This is why I think 37signals rock. To create something that is worth paying for, that people are enthusiastic about paying for is just wonderful.
My girlfriend is a budding photographer, and she shall be signing up to SmugMug as soon as she begins her studio work.
I claim innocence! My co-founder wrote those pages – not me.
Maybe he will call himself a “web 2.0″ company when web 3.0 arrives?
Even though there is a lot of hype arround the label web 2.0 I think it also a nice explanation what the website is all about: service, online usability and AJAX. Seems ok to me.
Regards,
René
Blogging with WordPress for web 1.0 and X.0
Almost everything in SmugMug is Web 2.0. Maybe the thing that makes it “Anti Web 2.0″ is that you have to pay to use the basic functionality. That’s not so community friendly. Flickr gives the basics for free.
They can deny the label all they want, but that’s rather ridiculous.
For those that actual understand the concept, there is no choice… you either fit into the mold or you don’t. And by the technology, features, and philosophy of their company… they clearly do fit into the “Web 2.0 mold.”
As for their actual service, if I was more serious with photography and if I didn’t already have a Flickr Pro account, I’d use SmugMug in a heartbeat.
I’ve said it many times before, and I’ll say it again… http://www.Fotki.com is where people should look if they’ve never heard of it.
This is a great update. I’ve been a smugmug user for some time and while it’s never had the cool factor of Flickr or others, for serious photography display it’s really the only option. And I don’t mean ’serious photographers’: I was after something where I could upload albums, choose from a range of public / private options, and be able to send links to pictures (in various sizes) and albums to friends and family. You ever tried getting anyone over about 40 to navigate Flickr? It’s a nightmare. Smugmug makes it all obvious. The price is absolutely worth it for the ease and convenience of the service.
Don’t I sound like a commercial? Just a satisfied customer. Avoid the vc’s forever more, Dan. Keep it in the family like you have been!
ok I looked at smugmug and its ridiculous.
now I have to decide which service I should pay for.
flickr or smugmug
what I need is a storage system for alle the photos I made in the last 6 years (parties, celebrations and so on).
is there a comparison between flickr and smugmug
i wanna have easy access for my family and friends to the pictures and I need a good backup – so I my harddisk crashes I wanna have to get all my pictures as fast as possible back (perhaps on dvd).
yeah, and I am from austria – so I the offered service should also be usable there.
you see – I need help to decide
@herbert:
There are lots of Flickr vs SmugMug comparisons out there. Google should be able to dig up plenty.
Both services are great, but they serve different purposes – I love Flickr and recommend it all the time when someone isn’t a great fit for SmugMug. We have plenty of customers who maintain Flickr accounts alongside their SmugMug accounts, too.
Your description makes it sound like you may be a good fit with us – our focus isn’t so much on online social networking, where Flickr excels, but on the viewing experience with your family and friends.
My best advice? Sign up for both services (we have a free trial for 14 days, Flickr has a free account level) and see which one suits you most. Google doesn’t hurt, either.
I love Smugmug – and happiéy am paying the yearly fee after recently leaving FLICKR.
The community is fantastic, patient and helpful. It is feature rich, and the ability to fully tailor the CSS of galleries and fully integrate into another website is fantastic …
Nice overall work Don!
How much bandwidth are you guys burning per day?
I’m wondering because in my opinion bandwidth and diskspace at S3 are not cheap at all. The only thing that you are sure to save is the man-power to set up the servers. Of course I’m talking about rented servers and not bought ones since those would mean a high primary cost.
“And like Yahoo Maps, SmugMug has gone through the painstaking process of updating URLs as people navigate the site. This is a problem that plagues Rich Internet Applications. Without a page refresh when navigating a Flash or Ajax application, the URL doesn’t update. SmugMug has solved that problem, even for Safari (which Yahoo still hasn’t solved).”
This isn’t true. There are well known patterns that solve this problem for Flash and Flex based applications. Yahoo in fact *has* solved this problem – you can see it in action on their new Yahoo Maps app – http://maps.yahoo.com. I’ve talked about this a few times on my blog at http://www.riapedia.com.
Mike
I agree with him about the Web 2.0 terminology…read O’Reilly and you will see what I mean.
However Don’s approach is very strange, he is out of the closet but apparently does not know it………
jean $ 40 min to upload, why pay that much, with that kind of annual payment a decent website and webspace can be bought.
You can make your own ketchup as well, so why are you buying Heinz?
This service works as a) it never needs maintaince by the photographer, b) pictures are easy to find, c) someone other than you as the uploader adds features to the site, d) you don’t have to care about backups, e) you get the benefit of a community so that others can find your photos.
To put it another way: $40 for a year is less than it would cost for an hour of work to get running.
- Thanks for adding a combo box to comments that makes it easier for users unfamiliar with SmugMug to determine if they are commenting on the photo or the gallery.
- I still think the Title field should move above the photo and should be editable separately (without a page refresh) as the description and keywords are now. Even better, the InlineEditBox (or similar design pattern) from the Dojo JavaScript toolkit (http://dojotoolkit.org/) is an example of how Flickr lets users quickly edit metadata, and I find this very powerful and intuitive
- I like the slide-out drawer for photos since most users don’t care about EXIF information or different sizes 80% of the time
- The biggest improvement is navigating between photos without a page refresh…and at the default photo size! (Flickr only allows me to navigate without page refresh, amongst the thumbnails. Nice work making this happen with URL rewriting and whatever other tricks you are using. I can sympathize with the amount of JavaScript work and browser testing that must have happened to make this feature go live. Great job!
- Still have not addressed moving one photo between multiple galleries? This is probably more of a “re-launch” feature since I’m guessing it would require some changes to the database. Are there plans to address this?
- Permissions are still a big deal, and I’m curious to see if SmugMug plans to add permissions to individual photos, and/or separate permissions for comments.
I’d like to dig in further to new features and will post an article to Pain in the Tech soon.
I love SmugMug (good work Don and team).
People always start comparing $40 to free and its so the wrong question to ask. The right question to ask is how important are my photos to me? And does a company who give me free space really care about my photos or have any significant incentive to care for them?
Flickr has some slick stuff (use them as well for projects) but I keep all my family photos on SmugMug for one simple reason… its easy to tell that SmugMug will go to just about any length necessary to keep my photos safe, beautifully viewable, and makes it dirt easy to get backups.
There’s a point that’s being overlooked here:
In theory, if Don were to approach a VC and say “we’re going to do photo-sharing for $40 p/mo.” he would get laughed out of the room. The obvious retort would be “people will never pay for that service when Flickr and other sites offer it for free”.
I just want to point out that what would intuitively seem obvious (no one wants to pay for a service they can get for free) can easily be wrong with the right type of execution.
I think people (investors, et al) are too quick to write off ideas and assume they know how a user population will react. The best way to test ideas to is to just go to market. Investors be damned.
Nice job, Dan.
I had the chance to speak with Don at SmugMug a while ago. The interview can be read here:
http://www.npos...?intID=INT00183
Quite an impressive company and I must say their focus on service and top notch support is very refreshing. This could be quite a service to appeal to the non-tech crowd.
“$ 40 min to upload, why pay that much, with that kind of annual payment a decent website and webspace can be bought.”
—————————-
Listen, I used to maintain my own site on my own webspace. That was only because there were no photo sharing sites back then. I put quite a bit of effort training myself to learn how to design in HTML and CSS because I didn’t want my site to look as ugly and broken as so many of the “oh, I’ll just use this cheap webspace” kinds of sites.
But I am a photographer, not a Web developer. I started to see photo web sites doing cool things I had no idea how to code and I didn’t have the funds to pay a custom developer. And cross-browser compatibility was keeping me from trying anything adventurous.
Then sites like Smugmug started appearing, which offered everything I wanted my site to have, but I didn’t have to write the code and do the cross-browser QA. I am so glad to get all that work off my back. Hell, I can’t even write proper JavaScript. They have real programmers who have the experience to add killer features and they have the resources to test it properly and thoroughly across browsers. And on top of that, I could use my own domain name, and customize the CSS. This is a great point: I can customize the CSS so that it looks like my site, not theirs, yet all of the underlying heavy machinery is stuff I don’t have to worry about. It’s the best of both worlds. The annual price of the pro level is a steal because if you took the same amount of money and gave it to a custom developer (or to me), you couldn’t get a decent site built for that amount of money.
Looks like they spoke too easy with not admitting to being web 2.0.
Check out this page: http://www.smugmug.com/price/ that they are claiming that they have cool web 2.0 features
;P
Cool I always believed in payment and subscription model. Hope that blog service provders build a payment model into the Blog service so that good work can get noticed and pay otherwise 2 cents.
Say what.
http://blogs.ib...echnicalJournal
Heh…It seems like just yesterday SmugMug was holding a photoshop contest on Fark to promote the business. I remember thinking, “They won’t make it.” I’m happy to see I was wrong.
The CEO of SmugMug is named Don, not Dan.
By the way folks, I came across this Job ad and just had to take a punch at it. The job post here is a “Senior Web 2.0 Executive”. What the heck is a Web2.0 Executive? It’s scary to think web 2.0 is now part of a job title.
http://gigaomjo.../jobs/view/1598
BlogReader, Les and a few others have it right. Yes you can build your own if you have the skills and yes there are free alternatives, but that isn’t the point. For one, it is obvious that there primary target is the pro or semi-pro photographer that want a really professional looking site for their clients to go to. For the non pro, you get the same features, a professional looking site and unlimited storage.
It has also been shown that while free services start out great, they rarely last, while the pay for service approaches tend to stay longer. Yes, Yes there will be exceptions but it tends to hold true over the long run. Either people are tired of seeing ads, or they feel better about paying for the service because they think the company will care more about them, as Paul mentioned above.
Anyone who has been involved with enterprise software can tell you that paying 6 or 7 figures for such software is more than common, even though in some cases there are free alternatives (even with paid support!) that exist.
I found SmugBug’s new AJAX UI to be hefty in terms of download footprint and development effort for the few improvements gained:
http://www.cooq...in-ajaxs-trunk/
I’m not a smugmug fan, I’ll start off with that, and I won’t defend the company, but… For $40 / month you are not only buying online storage, you are buying themed galleries to make your photos look pretty, you are buying the ability to share with other friends and family, you are buying all the fluff that your average user doesn’t know how to create on their own nor wants to bother to learn how. Countless people use Google’s Picassa program along with Flickr and a slew of other sites.
What isn’t told up front is that the “pro” side of things, aimed at weekend warrior photographers who want to offer online ordering for the clients, is a total rip off. They usually take upwards of 20% off your retail prices plus the print price. Say you sell an 8×10 print for $10, smugmug will take $2 + $2.99 for the cost of the 8×10 print (which isn’t even a completive price compared to mpix.com or whcc.com). That leaves you the photographer with $5 profit from a $10 retail item. Subtract out the $150 you need to pay yearly and it looks a lot less attractive. Most pro labs (local and internet) offer similar services that don’t double dip into the retail profits of the prints.
The other scary thing for the “pro” aspect, smugmug processes the credit card transactions of your customers and keeps email addresses of them. This is the same as similar company pictage.com, who will continue to spam your customers with specials and sale items, even if you don’t discount any of your items.
For your average home users, smugmug may make sense. For anything more then that, look to host your own, most cpanel web hosts have gallery and coppermine in one-click installs.
What’s the difference between a Internet/Web startup and a Web 2.0 startup? Is it possible to start a web-based company today and not be labelled “Web 2.0″?
If the answer is no, then why not just call them web startups? If yes, can anyone give some examples of new & recent web startups?
I haven’t read all these comments but I do want to say that I am one happy Smugmug camper. They provide exactly what I needed/wanted. I hate coding, and can’t remember most of it anyway.
Smugmug provided me with a simple solution. The incredibly customizable templates makes your site look so professional (my site is a personal family site, not for selling my photos). It’s also so much easier than my old hand coded site to update.
I pay for the professional level – and I think the money I spend is worth it.
The support forums are also incredible. ANY help you might need – can be found in the forums.
If anyone asked me who they should sign on with, I tell them to check out Smugmug.
$40/$149 per year is probably not “too much” if people are actually paying these amounts. The people that use SmugMug seem to really like it and if it wasn’t worth it to them they would quit the site and go to many of the alternative cheaper photo sharing sites out there. The fact that they charge as much as they do is probably a testament to their service and the fact that they keep their users happy more than anything.
It’s probably going to be harder to grow the site charging such high premiums, but SmugMug, from all I can tell seems to be pretty content with their place in the world, and why not with $10 million a year coming in.
Mike,
You shouldn’t force the “Web 2.0″ label on SmugMug because frankly, “Web 2.0″ is an un-definable, nebulous businessman term that adds nothing to the conversation. I would also take offense at being lumped-in with a volitile group of companys, many of which have no clear path to profitability and are merely riding the “Web 2.0″ buzz wave. It’s an objectionable and potentially dangerous term – bravo to Mr. MacAskill for being level-headed enough to recognize that.
Cheers to these guys!
What’s not to like about a company that didn’t take VC funding, offers a great service…so great people are willing to pay for it and they are profitable.
Aren’t these the things we all strive for? Especially the profitable part!
Wow Thomas, not one plug for Zooomr?!
Funny, I lay awake last night from 3:00 AM to 5:00 AM thinking about how trying to sell my pictures put me into the fulfillment business where I know I don’t want to be. This morning the SmugMug article arrived…
Lots of wasted worry
Paul:
I used to hand code my pages the hard way. When ever I uploaded new photos I had to edit all the old pages (didn’t know how to do a database driven site).
Smugmug makes it 1000% easier for me.
And yes, you can sell prints off of your site. I’m pretty sure you can alter the photo prices so YOU make money – this isn’t a feature I use though. I don’t sell my photos.
If someone has a smugmug site, they can let you have a coupon to save YOU $5.00 if you sign on (mine is QWn2117U1UdpM if interested). Not only do you save $5.00, I do too (assuming that you sign up and use the code, and assuming I renew – which I will be).
There are still people (person?) complaining about the $40 price? It’s a perfectly fair price.
@Dan
Grats to you on taking the road less traveled, FWIW I dont get it either but sometimes traditional shoes (community building) come back in style (Web 2.0) and if they fit well…..just keep on wearing them.
@ m3mn0n
“For those that actual understand the concept, there is no choice… you either fit into the mold or you don’t. And by the technology, features, and philosophy of their company… they clearly do fit into the “Web 2.0 mold.”
OTOH sometimes people are just mouldy……
What I mean is because someone subscribes to the premises of the current PR/Marketing trend, if they have no product, no revenue stream and no demand then they are full of shit or they are trying to leveredge some useless idea to get financing at the expense of legitimate companies…..or both.
There is a choice, you can adopt what your community finds desirable, what grows that community and what works for your organization and throw out the rest without using the flavor du jour, or you can use the flavor du jour and drop it later, (rebrand), however what you cant do is marry yourself so closely for the sake of acceptance, that it impedes your business as a whole, otherwise you will have nothing left to rebrand later……
Just a little FYI from a 1.0 refugee….
If you’re only using smugmug for proofing services, you might want to consider http://www.pictureproofs.com. They only charge 5% comission on what you sell. No membership fee. So this might be a better choice if you don’t make many sales.
I actually like tabblo.com better. check it out.
I’ve seen a few quotes referring to Smugmug’s “$40/month” fee. Guys it’s $40 PER YEAR.
http://www.codershangout.com
Dan MacaSkill seems to have the right idea. He’s not relying on some fancy next big thing model. He’s making serious money and offering a great service in the process. More web 2.0 startups should look at his model and try and make their start ups profitable and sustainable before they bubble.
Don, since you seem to be floating the comments…
What are your thoughts on how prevalent VC funding seems to be in small startups? In my opinion it seems to be entirely too trendy right now, and would even go so far to say that 70% of the funding Michael reports on here is unnecessary.
It’s so easy to scale on the web…most of these startups shouldn’t require more than 5-10k, a garage, and a year to become self-reliant and profitable.
Hoping you’ll share your opinions.