June 4, 2003
Fotolog.net revolution volta!
Apparently Gothamist was right- the titanic battle between sexy Brazilian camgirls and artistic New York photobloggers exploded today on fotolog.net. With the popularity of the site increasing exponentially, server costs have been going up by leaps and bounds. Donations had been coming in, but not fast enough to keep pace with the server bills. Rather than shut down new memberships, Cypher, Scott and their crew decided to start a "gold camera" program- $5 a month for full features, including up to 6 photos a day and up to 100 comments. People who don't pay would still be allowed to upload one picture each day and have up to 5 people comment.
Most of the prominent photobloggers signed up right away, including lauratitian, cypher, eshepard, along with dozens of their less prominent cohorts. The camgirls did not follow suit. Instead, they almost immediately organized a posting protest (a postcott?). Protest pictures began appearing all over the camgirl sites, and also in the comments on sites all over fotolog.net (eebmor tipped us off to the pornographic comments the Brazilians were posting). Soon the photobloggers retailiated, organizing their own posting campaign in support of the new fee structure. The battle appears to be growing fiercer - but what will come next is anyone's guess. Gothamist proposes that both groups support their political positions in the manner of protestors in the late 1960s- strip naked and jump in front of the camera. On second thought, scratch that.
Why are the camgirls so upset? We're guessing that it's the about the strength of the Brazilian currency - the camgirls just can't afford to pay the fee. (We need Felix Salmon to weigh in that matter.) Will fotolog.net introduce some sort of regional pricing structure to make it easier for the camgirls, or will this fight force the camgirls to startup their own version of the site, cleansed of the artistic impulses of the photobloggers? While we suspect there must be Brazilian tech guys more than willing to help the camgirls, only time will tell.
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I did a little research and found out the real is trading at about 3:1 against the dollar, and it has actually gained strength over the last six months. Still, $5 might still be a lot to the average Brazilian camgirl:
"Recent studies by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC/CEPAL) indicate that in 1996 there were 55 million Brazilians living below the poverty line, i.e., with a per capita monthly income of less than R$140 (U$70). Some 21.3 million were classified as destitute, with a per capita monthly income of less than R$70 (U$35)."
More current stats can be found here.
That's why I put the image of a total of 16 reals up there. It's about $5, which is the monthly cost of the features.
hey, if they can affort internet and a cam to take the pics, they can afort 5 bucks. i'm brazilian myself and they are just whining. believe me. :)
scott and cypher's comments can be found on and through heif's photolog.
I'm flattered! So flattered, indeed, that I'll actually attempt to answer the question, in part by pointing you here, to a ranking of countries by Gini coefficient. You know what the Gini coefficient is, right? No? Well, in a nutshell, it measures inequality. The higher the coefficient, the more inequality there is. So Sweden and Japan are 25, Germany is 30, Canada is 32, the UK is 37, and the US is 41. And Brazil? Brazil is right at the top of the list, with 59.
What can we deduce from this? Well, despite the fact that Brazil is a poor country overall, it still has quite a lot of reasonably rich people with digicams and internet access. Patricia has a good point.
The question, of course, is where the camgirls fall on the income-distribution scale. My hunch is that nearly all of them are from the south-east, and that they're basically middle-class: they'll have bank accounts, but they won't have servants. $60/year for these people is definitely a non-negligible amount of money. And it's certainly true that the Brazilian banking system is not set up to easily facilitate the transfer of $5 a month to the US. These kind of payments are difficult for Brazilians to make.
So the effect of setting up the "gold camera" system is inevitably going to be a 2-tier fotolog, with the US elite getting their pretty icons, and the Brazilian underclass either unable or unwilling to pay for the privilege of joining them. With the playing field no longer level, it's easy to see how some resentment might arise.
Thanks, Felix! I knew we needed to get your insight on this matter.
More to the point, US has a population of 280.56 million people, and 165.750 million Internet users (59%). Brazil has a population of 176.029 million people, and 13.98 million Internet users (8%). I bet you that the inequality is even higher – much higher – when you look at the Brazilian internet user profile. The average Brazilian internet user is in better economic condition than the average American internet user.
Never been to Fotolog before (too boring), but a friend just told me about brazilians kids making a fool of themselves on the web, so I had to check it out.
Been there. Seen the pictures. Seen the faces. These are all upper middle class kids from Brazil's best cities and neighborhoods. They sure as hell have R$ 15 to pay for fotolog, if it is so damn important.
Let's use the McDonalds Rule for calculating the *real* value of currency: a Big Mac meal (w/ medium fries and medium coke) costs about R$ 7. So, now you have a pretty good idea of what does US$ 5 represents.
Please ignore them and they will go away. As every spoiled brat in the planet, one characteristic they lack is persistance.
I did some research and I found that a DC-3500 digicam costs about US$ 89.88 at Amazon.com, and R$ 899.00 (about U$ 300) at a equivalent online store in Brazil. So I don’t get it. If you’re in a condition you can pay 3.3 times the price an American pays for the exact same product, and given you live in a worse economy, why do you complain about paying the SAME PRICE? You already pay MORE for other stuff!
As you well know, Mr (Ms?) plainstupidity, most things in Brazil are cheaper than they are in the US. Food, clothing, and -- most importantly -- housing: unless you live on the beach in Rio and wear designer duds, your outlays are going to be much lower than those of an American. That's what import substitution is all about: if you buy a t-shirt, it'll cost much less in Brazil than in the US, but if you insist on buying a designer Dolce & Gabbana t-shirt, it'll cost much more. Imports are expensive, and digital cameras are imports, therefore digital cameras -- a luxury item -- are expensive. (Of course, if you're a typical upper-middle class Brazilian, there's a good chance you'll buy your digicam duty-free at Miami airport. They don't sell fotolog subscriptions there.)
The point is, fotolog isn't a luxury imported item like a pair of Prada sunglasses, it's an ongoing expense, like rent. And in such matters, Brazilians are used to paying much less than Americans, not much more. Put it this way: would you ask Americans to pay the same amount for a month of fotolog as they would for a maid's services for a day?
hi, ...actually, I didn't "sign up right away", just to correct your record. I was an early donator, and they granted me a gold camera based on that prior-dontation, months before gold-camera was an option. It's unfortunate that a lot of the international community currently has their hands-tied (relatively) in that they aren't able to contribute via Paypal. And $5 US is not the same as, say, $5 India.
I think this is something missing in the discussion here: the fact that Paypal doesn't work for many countries outside of the US, including Brazil and China. Unable to use Paypal, the folks in in many of these countries who might wish or are able to pay, don't know where to send their money. Paypal is usable by just 38 countries in the world.
I hope you don't mind. I found the discussion here so informative that I posted the whole thing at fotolog (with link attached, of course). I thought the community could benefit from it ... especially felix's thoughts). If I copied too much, just let me know and I'll take it down.
Laura's point about things like PayPal easy-of-use outside of the U.S. is very important. The problem is that people who have used fotolog, a free and empowering service, early on has been spoiled by the benefits. It's similar to Yahoo! Mail now charging if you go over a certain amount or Salon/People/Enterainment Weekly turning their sites into a subscriber-models - and those are sites with ad revenue that are business, versus fotolog.net which is still essentially a free service. It's an annoying market feature that causes a self-selection of who gets to post more and who is featured as most viewed...but, again, it's not as though all photo-posting privileges are eliminated.
on the topic of "who gets featured as most-viewed" : this is a limitation I would like to convice the admin to reconsider. I'd like to see everyone, gold-camera or not, eligible for most-viewed presence on the homepage. (I'll address them directly when we have some time to talk)... meanwhile, jkh_22 discusses it with much good sense in her post here.
i agree with Laura and her sis- i think the most viewed list and the comments should not be tied to the gold camera. i think that if bandwidth limitation is the main goal, then confining people to posting only 1 image a day, and limiting the number of comments to something reasonable, like 50, would accomplish that without penalizing anyone. also- surely there must be an electronic payment system that can take money in reals and process it into dollars- i think cypher should look into that and see if an accomodation can be found for the brazilians.
My point was only to illustrate the fact that these people are not as poor as they claim to be. I personally think that $5 for 150 pictures is pricey, but $0 for 30 pictures is priceless.
I second Jake, Laura, and Jkh_22 in that the most viewed list should be open to all. I imagine most if not all Fotolog donors would want to see highly viewed images from among the 11,000+ members, not just the paying subset. But the problem would then be that you couldn't comment on them, because in most cases they'd already have ten comments. That's unsatisfying for the viewer and the viewee. On the money/upload/bandwith issue, I certainly understand the financial issue, but I wonder if tweaking the variables in this way would be affordable: Free--3 uploads per day, 25 comments. $5 month--stays same at 6/100. One image a day is just too restricting--you want them to play off each other, and to be able to come back in a few hours and surprise people again. I know that one a day would make me lose interest altogether.
I liked the front page teaser pic of the skirt better.
If they upgrade to 3 a day for free they'll lose a lot of contributors. Nobody is going to pay $5 a month for double the pictures when they can upload half for free.
I agree with plainstupidty. 1 Picture is enough. The comments can be a little more, but it the comments were abused by some and that was wrong. Maybe the free service should have around 15-20 comments. I think that's sufficient enough. I myself donated twice so I already had the gold cam when the policy was changed. However, i do know not everyone has the money, but the service is still free. I feel there was a lot of immaturity shown by people that complained though.
thanks kim, (those are my knees in that skirt, afaterall) hehe hehe...
Quote from wired magazine website: "The battle between the Brazilian camgirls and the would-be Weegees was first noticed by Jake Dobkin, a contributor to Gothamist, a New York group weblog.
its at www.wired.com
bout time you people starting getting more press. Congrats!
This is a reflection of the daily life where people fill the the streets with garbage, drivers disrespect all the rules, landmarks are destroyed by vandals, martial art fighters - 'pitboys' - go out to have fun and practice gratuitous violence. Of course Brazil is much more than that, much better that. But it will never be the same for the people who witnessed the sad side of its culture.
camgirls rule!
These cyber-hooligans have money, don't worry about that. Almost anyone who can afford broadband, phone bills for an internet connection, computer, digital camera or webcam in Brazil -- to say nothing about English classes -- can easily spare the monthly R$ 15 asked by Fotolog.
I think there are basically two problems here: Paypal, which is not a real alternative in Brazil (especially for kids who depend on their parents' credit cards) and the unfortunate fact that, apparently, Fotolog has attracted a dreadful kind of Brazilian teens -- bored, spoiled, vulgar and uneducated, in spite of their social status.
Thank goodness the country is much, much better than this.
it's true!
The brazilian youth can afford the services but most of them are not willing to pay for it or simply don't know how to do it.
In spite of the growing number of the users in Brazil, you can see by the growing numbers of Fotolog or Blogger.com.br, Internet is still very new to the majority of the Brazilians, included the ones that are already browsing. More than any other countries in the world, the web business is still very unprofitable in Brazil and users are still not used to paying for web services.
Realistically, what is happening with Fotolog is the same that is happening everywhere. Users who paid are sponsoring the ones who do not pay ... in this case many of them ... and they are not always "polite".
In spite of the democracy and freedom of the web, the fact is that money moves the world and the only solution is to restrict the access to paid users, resulting in better service to all and in return, having only selective users.