September 29, 2004
Save Fotolog.net!
Our friends over at Fotolog.net have a serious problem- the runaway success of the site has run up quite a server bill: some $70,000 dollars and counting. Cypher reports that the site is doing "over half a billion page views per month", or about "70 servers and... 22 terabytes of bandwidth each month." The founders have been working diligently through the summer to secure funding, and rumor is that investors have been pretty receptive to the pitch- after all, Fotolog is probably the most popular photoblog service on the Internet. However, closing investment deals takes a lot of time, and Fotolog needs money now. As such, Fotolog has put out the Paypal hat, and asked their users, friends, and supporters to show some love.
If you are a Fotolog user, you already know how great the service is, so you should be first in line. But even those of us who do not have sites at Fotolog benefit from the site's existence: we receive the gift of great photography, for free, every day. Now it's time to say thanks: Gothamist has sent in our money. If you can, send some of yours! [Related: catch many great fotobloggers (and photobloggers!), including Laura and Eliot, at the Apple Store Soho, Thursday 6pm.]
Picture by KDunk, this week's Gothamist interviewer!
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It suddenly feels like the bullshit days of dotcom boom again.
Donations for a for-profit business venture that is "close" to securing funding, yet desperate enough to put up a PayPal link? Bleagh!
How about this:
Have them change their business model from providing "FREE" services to a system that has "FREE" services plus pay services. Such as if a certain blogger eats up more bandwidth than others *GASP* they pay for it.
Why should I or anyone have to "donate" funds for a for-profit site and for bandwidth used by others?
Fotolog is a great site, but I agree with Dazzle2112. Why should we donate to a for-profit website?
What happens when they pay their past-due bills? Then what? The bills will keep on coming. They need to seriously re-examine their business model and come up with some revenue streams if they want to stick around. If people enjoy posting photos on the site so much they should start paying for it.
first & foremost — why are so many fotolog users brazilian teenagers? i just don't get it.
Fotolog *does* offer free services. For free you can upload 1-photo a day w/ a short message board. Becoming a "gold camera" paid member gets you up to 6 photos/day + more message board capacity.
Fotolog *does* offer free services. For free you can upload 1-photo a day w/ a short message board. Becoming a "gold camera" paid member gets you up to 6 photos/day + more message board capacity.
these things aren't so black and white- fotolog is a community site more than anything else. it will be a great business, i'm sure, b/c it's a good service that plenty of people would pay for. but sometimes the timing works against these things. and rather than see that happen, and lose the good that the site creates for its users and for the rest of us (the free riders), i think we can step up and do something about it.
A site based on sharing images which will naturally tip the bandwidth WAAAY higher than normal sites should really plan better.
What do the donors get? The satisfaction of helping yet another ill planned web site marginallly reach it's goals towards a business model? Nigga please, we're not dumb.
With $70,000 in debt, I doubt they will reach that amount via a twee little PayPal link.
Some people forget the lessons learned by the dotcom bust.
fotolog is one of the best ways to expose yourself to the photos that both people in your community and around the world are taking. So what if they didn't "plan better?" It's worth helping out because it's become a great forum to get feedback on your work. That's important. Better to pay a little to save a great site, then to have no fotolog at all.
Will they return my "donation" after they sell the company to investors who will then make money off ads?
Sounds more like they're "putting out the PayPal hat" for investors who will get nothing in return.
What a bizzare sense of entitlement.
Fotolog claims to have 648,821 "fotologers'. If each of those people paid 11 cents, they'd be out of debt in no time.
They also say they have 20,009,594 photos on the site. Why not charge people 5 cents per photo upload? None of their fotologgers would go broke sharing their photos [for $1.50 a month, users could upload one photo a day] and Fotolog would have a million dollars right now!
It's a great idea in principle, but I'm with everyone else here who is not inclined to support people who don't exercise a minimum of common business sense. You can't get something for nothing, and if you have a valuable and successful product you don't need to be giving it away. I wish them the best of luck working things out!
Fotolog claims to have 648,821 "fotologers'. If each of those people paid 11 cents, they'd be out of debt in no time.
They also say they have 20,009,594 photos on the site. Why not charge people 5 cents per photo upload? None of their fotologgers would go broke sharing their photos [for $1.50 a month, users could upload one photo a day] and Fotolog would have a million dollars right now!
It's a great idea in principle, but I'm with everyone else here who is not inclined to support people who don't exercise a minimum of common business sense. You can't get something for nothing, and if you have a valuable and successful product you don't need to be giving it away. I wish them the best of luck working things out!
Stella, kudos on the math. Of course, if they started charging fees I would bet the numbers of users would drop significantly because people are cheap-skates.
"What?! No free image hosting! No free services!? I'm outta here!"
Why I find interesting is that they slip in 'partner' UBBI (which appears to be a search engine) on the page where they are begging, and don't mention them as 'partner' in the FAQ. But whatever, they're like that woman who ran up her credit cards and asked for money. If you want to fund that kind of idiocy, it's your buck. Jake: if it was that much of a community, why didn't more members electively pay for their membership. Surely a community would understand a sense of 'community good'.
eh- i think you need to look at it like this:
1. if you are a fotologger, you should be donating- if you don't, inevitably they'll be forced to require monthly payments from all fotologgers, and shut off the accounts of people who don't or can't pay. personally, i think there's nothing wrong with this- i'd give everyone a 30 day warning and then start charging $5/month for all users. and i'd make it so you could sign up for a new account and get 1 month free, but you had to give a credit card to do it.
2. for those of us who don't use the service, but enjoy the pictures, you should donate, because you are enjoying their service and riding free on their dime. you can argue about how much that enjoyment is worth, but i think it's morally wrong to free ride.
3. if you don't use the service, and never look at it, then it's irrelevant- no one expects you to care about this argument, or give any cash to fotolog.net.
so i don't see how you can disagree with that.
how about slapping some advertising on those pages? i'm sure you could do well with targeted ads for the different countries.
Exactly what tien said and what Stella says. There are some very obvious ways to raise money without a stupid "Won't you pwease hewlp us!" plea. They are a for profit operation, and when I used the phrase "business model" I was using it loosely. This is not rocket science; it's common sense. If you have X numbers of members and X numbers pictures, charging people even $1 for a one year account is VERY reasonable AND will end your debt. Ditto with the ad idea. Targetted audiences are the key to grabbing many Internet ads. I'm sure that if he simly went to enough agencies he'd get enough RFPs and IOs to make the site float again.
Scott Heiferman does do some great things to stimulate community online, but he has less business sense than a Girl Scout selling cookies. And that's an insult to Girl Scouts.
Also, yes we can ignore this. But Jake you're ignoring the inherent craziness of this plea for help. But at the same time perhaps the powers that be at Fotolog need a swift kick in the Web-ass to get them in gear. Many of us who survived the dot-com boom and bust are simply sick of the dumb buisiness models and dumb business mentalities that grew in that era. A PayPal link on a for-profit site is pathetic and lame.
Quite honestly, I paid to use the site for a while, but stopped because 70% of the time it didn't work correctly-- my settings/screen colors didn't work, photos wouldn't show up upon upload, etc. I also got a zillion (I'm exaggerating here, of coure) spam messages from Brazilian teenagers. I didn't find the site worth paying for. On the other hand, I would be happy to donate to it if they cleaned it up a bit, had some standards for posting (getting rid of the Brazilian spam, for example), etc. That might require them to have some revenue, and I totally understand that. I guess what I'm saying is that I agree with Jake on some points-- the site is worth supporting-- but on the other hand, I want to support a product that I have faith in. I'd want to know that my $-- no matter how little it is-- was going toward making the site better and more effective.
Brazilian teenagers!? Something's not right.
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