Picture and file hosting has established credentials as a business idea. As the cost of storage has rapidly decreased as social networking has boomed picture hosting has been a hot vertical. There’s no shortage of sites in this space, and easy money to be had. At the very top Photobucket was acquired by MySpace for $250 million. To date free file hosting sites have been just that: free file hosting where essentially you get a service for free and the operators keep the profits from the site. Shareapic wants to change that.
Shareapic’s model is simple. It offers the same basic service other free hosting sites offer; upload your pic, get an embed code then display the pic on your site of choice. But Shareapic believes that their success in hosting files and profiting from this should be rewarded. Every registered Shareapic user gets a cut of any advertising revenues Shareapic makes. Primarily this isn’t based on advertising revenue made against each image (although users can add their Adsense code for some revenue via Google), payments are calculated based on image views. Their example:
If in month one Shareapic calculates to distribute $1,000 to our members, we will first tally up the total number of image views for that month. Using these two numbers we can determine the respective payouts for each user. If there were a total of 500,000 image views for the month, image views will equate to $0.002 each (1,000 divided by 500,000), or $2 per 1000 image views. If you’re posting lots of pics in forums, MySpace or eBay, you can see how easy it is to earn quite a bit of money!
Perhaps the only draw back is that Shareapic doesn’t disclose the revenue share; it may lack transparency but it’s still more than other sites pay in this space, which is zero.
We’ve covered two other companies that paid members to participate today, AGLOCO which went to the deadpool, and Capazoo, both of which had dubious multi-level marketing schemes (some would suggest pyramid schemes) and usually come with a catch. By comparison Shareapic has an honest model, so honest in fact that it should be the way of the future. What Shareapic does is recognize that users of a free service provide a financial benefit to the provider, and that in return profits provided by user participation should be shared (at least in part) back. Imagine the hours and hours put in by Facebook users or users of other sites; they may be free services but the providers benefit from each participant, and in the case of Facebook’s valuation, greatly. Expect to see more sites like Shareapic who value their users to the point that they offer financial rewards in return; it’s not only a smart marketing pitch it’s also fair recognition of your time and your effort in a market where many have business models that expect a free ride from their users. Build it and they will come may well be replaced with reward them for their time by sharing profits, and we’ll all be the winners from that.
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A cute game of a dog chasing its tail.
If you run fast enough you’ll be able to run away from server costs, admin/logistics/sales and finally catch on to that razor thin margin of ad revenue.
Spin spin spin spin little startup, spin. One day you might bluff your way into a decent exit.
I think it could result in more professionalisation of the Web 2.0 service , and better experiance for the audience.
http://tekno-world.blogspot.com
Alaska
they only pay a cut of their profit, so ultimately it depends on them being profitable. With Amazon services you’d be surprised how cheap storage is these days, and the margins are surprisingly easy, which is why there are sooooo many sites in this space.
i think it’s shareapic.net, not .com –
Duncan,
What makes this even sweeter is that they’re paying via “rewards” to companies that I’m sure will give them the ability to leverage points or bulk buys of credit.
In other words - even the rewards they give - won’t be a true dollar for dollar scenario.
Good legs if they reach critical mass fast and treat their top % of users like gold.
WH
This is interesting. I heard this same message about a year ago from http://www.cambrianhouse.com Too bad they didn’t think of a market that this idea would work in. Looks like shareapic has.
Drew
apologies, fixed now.
This type of model will come to dominate more and more… yes, there will be kinks to work out and some will fail, just like with all startups… but this is the future… it is inevitable.
chrisco
I think it recognizes the value in our contributions. If I ever find time to become a regular contributor to Fark photoshop contests again I’m going to make money from this
Don’t fall for this pyramid schemes. I remember freePC. They force people to click their ads to get free dell computers. The company ran out business without trace.
Many investors with draw its money during dot com days. They discover adverstiment Ponzi schemes. Many young college graduates couldn’t get a job at IBM, Apple, Ford motors, GE, GE, etc.. Why?
telemarketi ringing homes.
remember this “http://getfreexbox.com” on G4 commerical. Not many people got xbox. They got massive telemarket calls.
Number of job loses.
Number of homes sales drop.
Next year it will do worst.
This is fact.
Security risk payments
read the post: this isn’t a pyramid scheme, this is a simple rev share model, pretty much as honest as they get, but generally I do take your point.
I hope companies like Microsoft, Google, Norton or Mcafee or other startups does remove ad scheme websites.
Next year, I don’t want to see high growth inflation and higher oil price, forecloser, high layoffs, web 2.0 melt down, and crash of web 2.0.
As visionary, I’m beginning to see huge Web 2.0 crash.
Next years prediction
I don’t get you on this? ad scheme sites? it’s a free file hosting sites that offers a rev share based on any advertising revenue it makes. They all make advertising revenue (photobucket and others included), the only difference here is they’ll give some back. No scam, no spam, just we share our rev with you.
Forget it Duncan… Security and privacy is most important. Any health insurance companies could buy those data less than second.
AOL does embrassing leaks.
Security risk payments
two comments in a row that don’t make a lot of sense. Security and privacy are no different here to many other sites, so I’m not sure how your comment is relevant.
One can also argue that it’s rewarding those who share copyrighted images.
duncan-why posting all these scams.
With a bit of luck they can raise enough money to pay the legal costs for copying Skype’s logo.
Am I the only person to notice this? It’s not so much a strong resemblance as completely frickin identical.
CAR
unlike the other two I happen to think this is a reasonably good idea. Why shouldn’t we be compensated for our time boosting the valuations of a startup/ site? it’s an honest compensation model, simply a % of the revenue from the site, so they aren’t promising the world to only later fail to deliver.
Cool. I am going to use this service. Atleast upload what all I have and keep getting who know if I make a big some some day.
Site uses adsense and popups. Google will drop this site for copyright violations. I give it
Umm their logo looks exactly like Skype’s logo design. I was confused for a few seconds…..
Not too interesting.. and nothing innovative… /ac.
Good Lord, they are using skype’s logo, created using some of those web 2.0 layers for Photoshop. Where’s creativity? Hum…
ShareaPic is full of advertisement……This website sucks !!!
I think I’m with every else here. The logo and content screams “Skype”!
As for the product itself, revenue-sharing is only a marketing tactic. At the end of the day, the features and experience still need to exceed those of competitors.
Cheers,
Aidan
http://www.MappingTheWeb.com
You should be putting Capazoo in the deadpool as well. They’re laying off workers, firing their vendors, not paying their bills/invoices/payroll, and the operation is essentially on life support.
Thanks for sharing ideas guys, a newbie like me gains a lot of information from you especially when it comes to criticizing sites.
Nhick
http://www.itrush.com
Actually I think rev share is an incredibly good idea. It’s a good way to attract attention. However, since the pay is based on image views, won’t they have to worry about fraud issues? I’d like to know how they deal with this.
Its a great business model, sharing what you earn with people who help you earn …
but the way I see it with photographs, its very difficult to get decent view sharing mediocre picture of friends and families.. stock quality images that they show in their front page, well lets say if you have quality pictures you would want to post them on a micro or macro stock photo website and earn revenue that way … unless you are one of the paparazzi and caught Brtiney/Paris in a nice act.. which translates to copyright violated images being circulated through the website you can’t earn anything sizable - Surely a lot of people will initially post tons of pictures and see $0.50 in money earned section, some better than others, but over the time it will be far less money for the effort you put in and you would rather post it somewhere like flickr where you are not searching for your pictures in the middle of ads!
The ShareAPic has its advantages, but we need to know how to use this tool.
what if i copy all the pics I can see from flickr and put it there? will I get 20mil page that generates rev for me?
Duncan,
I signed up and was totally disappointed.
The site has a lot of advertisements and e-mail offers (sign-up and we’ll send you… you’ll get free..).
It’s more like one of those marketing websites. It’s borderline MLM (for now) and I’m pretty sure once they couldn’t get the target money they will move aggressively in terms of “spamming” your e-mail or whatnot.
Isn’t there already http://www.sharedimages.org/ ? They pay 1USD per 1153 visitors. There was imagecash some time back, but that one folded already.
@Alaska Miller - We are spinning so to speak but we are not having any margin problems, we have slowly invested into our own machines buying more as we received more profit as opposed to renting and paying too much for bandwidth…
@Duncan Riley - Thanks for your optimism.. We have proven that the model works… it just took us a while to find the optimal payrate which is proven now to be .22 cents cpm…
@Ed - Sorry you were so disappointed… Ads are how we stay alive and also how we can pay our users such a high rate! Which has been and will continue to stay @ .22 cents per 1000 impressions
@advancedovariancancersymptom Please read our faq’s…
@Aidan Henry - We did not “Steal” Skypes logo… we just took the web2.0 look that is so popular right now..
@Ghaus - Advertisements are how “free service” sites generate income its what the users have to deal with to get what they want in return..
@John - we no longer use adsense but allow our users to…
Ill check back on this post soon and anwswer any more questions and reply to comments, thanks for the positive press..
-Daniel Fontana
Owner/
Lead Project Manager
http://www.shareapic.net
I agree there’s still a LOT to work out for these kinds of models, especially just for static images. Videos can have a pre-roll and other forms of advertising, and as Michael [Arrington] pointed out in this post http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....e-img-tag/ about http://www.britepic.com/ things are on the way for static images as well. It’s going to take time, but the model is there, somewhere. IMHO.
Ah, you guys are moderating comments now… that’s good. no need to “approve” this one, just a thumbs up to TechCrunch… I mean it’d be nice if it wasn’t necessary, but a few bad apples seem to make it so in all walks of life, unfortunately. Cheers, chrisco (hoping my startup will be featured — in a positive light — on TC one day, but it’s not near ready yet. Cheers again!
Daniel,
While I wouldn’t expect you to say “yes, we copied Skype’s logo”, you really can’t expect anyone to believe your denial. It’s all-lowercase white text with a sky-blue surround that has a gradient that gets darker from top to bottom. Skype’s surround is a bit more random and cloud-like, but that’s literally the only difference - and it just makes Shareapic’s logo merely a cheap copy rather than an exact copy.
I can only hope you didn’t pay anyone to come up with that.
This is a test to see if TC is moderating comments. Please ignore.
Cheers,
Doug
No, they’re not moderating comments, Chrisco. Perhaps only certain users were placed on moderation, based on their IPs or something?
Cheers,
Doug
That’s awesome. But i’d rather carry all my images with me everywhere i go.
Check out this innovative usb pendant from Olinari.
http://olinari.com
Can this steaming pile of Shareapic just fail already? It’s wasted too much of my time as it is.
Glad to see Duncan Riley keep up his record of utterly lacking technological prowess or business acumen. I think he could be replaced by a mail filter that bounced PR pitches directly to the blog.
“and easy money to be had”
Its not that easy - images tend to get larger and larger (3mb and up). This causes a large amount of data that has be stored and served. Even with good bandwidth-prices it is hard to stay profitable. And if you do not allow nudity you have to spend hours after hours to screen the images.
Under the line free image hosting still pays off but is definitely not just easy money.
Revenue sharing is an excellent method of driving traffic. Nice work @shareapic
oh btw @shareapic..
I suggest the google adsense-api. It is a great method of earning some extra money!
@Duncan - I agree with your sentiments that rev share is pretty considerate.
But from a business perspective, I don’t think it’ll work out very well, esp. in this case with posting photos. It’s going to run rampant with spam and gaming of the system. Let’s start a pool on the days left before this one gets deadpooled.
From just looking at the site all the prominate pictures are pictures that someone took from somewhere else. So all you have to do is troll the internet all day, download popular pictures you don’t have the rights to, post them on this site and make money. Sound like a great site for the lawyers out there to take alokk at huh!
@FacebookBandwagon - In the past couple years that Shareapic has existed, we have indeed dealt with many methods of “spamming.” However, we have adapted to recognize spamming of images just as easily as you learn to deal with blog spam. It has been a challenge, but we have custom coded internal tools to help us detect misuse and delete / ban users who try to generate false impressions. So far, so good.
@ImageBam - “Even with good bandwidth-prices it is hard to stay profitable.” Not so!! We run our own servers and have a custom contract with our data center
Profitable is something we certainly are. You have to be in order to keep expanding.
- Jordan Donaldson
Owner
http://www.shareapic.net
What if people upload something from FLICKR picture in a sharepic.com?
@what happens its shareapic.net not shareapic.com…
@ImageBam.com glad to hear the positive remarks… It has been a struggle to deal with bandwidth costs and we had that problem when we rented servers from companys that implemented hefty overages etc. But with co-location and owning your own powerful servers/hard drives it is alot easier to manage costs.
___________
@MuyLamo - Dont be a flammer… the big and most successful users of shareapic.net make more then enough to cover the servers/bandwidth they rent for their successful blogs which makes them more then happy. here is an example of one of our users blogs.. -
http://soaddictive.fr/
and this is his public gallery area at Shareapic.net
http://www.shareapic.net/users/soaddictive/
_____
@everyone - The ability earn additional money just for doing what you would call a hobby is amazing to people.. which is why alot of celeb bloggers use our service to host their pictures. I do agree that shareapic.net is not for everyone but for the people that use it right it is a very valuable service.
In theory - a great idea.
In practice you get:
1. Views fraud (like click fraud, but much easier to make happen)
2. Copyright violations - take someone else’ catchy pic of a semi-naked babe, post it on a few hot forums and there you have it.
Good luck