Ask HN: Is there room for another photo sharing service?
I was having a discussion with my friends on photo sharing and a lot of them didnt seem to like the existing solutions. There are many photo sharing services and every social networks seems to offer it as well. But there are always people who are looking for a better solution.
Do you think there is room for a new picture sharing site?
46 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadYou said it yourself:
>But there are always people who are looking for a better solution.
Don't dive straight in, work out what users want that flickr/etc doesn't offer - and do that.
(ie - savvy enough to use/explore your site while not knowing about fb/flickr/etc)
my mother and father both use online services (eg ebay) and have never heard of facebook - they've both rang me up and asked me how to share photos they took online.
(I told them to use the me.com services, fwiw -- that'll be a huge competitor to "mom and pop" photo services)
Yes, indeed. I have a few friends who use fb and after some time they tend to think that "everyone is on the facebook". ;-) But actually not. There are many more people who don't know what fb is, or they don't use it.
My point wasn't that there aren't millions of internet users who aren't on facebook - it's that there aren't millions of internet users who WOULD BE INTERESTED IN SHARING PHOTOS who aren't on a social network of some sort..
How do you think most users of digital cameras share photos? via email? Print them out? You know, and I know those two methods are rubbish.
Even if there isn't millions of users - you'd only need a few thousand to get your startup rocking.
I see a clear case for a photo-sharing service specifically designed to host high-resolution images (big size) images which are rapidly becoming the norm with higher resolution cameras rolling out.
What would it take:
1. Uploading will take more time. Should happen in the background. 2. Browsing can be made better - by showing reduced resolutions on the fly - zooming out on parts etc.
Perhaps expensive though.
Page views and ads and referral arrangements to photo printers aren't going to automatically scale with photo sizes for a free site.
In terms of bandwidth, a flickr-like display that shows a smaller size by default mitigates that. It's the convenience of uploading a full-size file and getting it resized to multiple sizes (and the full size is there for those who want to see it).
Not so fast. Bandwidth and storage needs scale roughly with resolution, but other costs scale more slowly or even not at all. Note that even storage (and to a lesser extend bandwidth) has a per-action cost that does not depend (much) on resolution. And, storage costs include meta data, which doesn't scale with resolution.
I've been working through a cost model for a (different kind of) image service and there are are surprises.
For a first approximation, work through how you might build such a site on Google App Engine and/or Amazon Web Services and build a parameterized cost model using their fee schedules for different things. Fiddle with the values for the parameters.
To a large extent, I have worked through it for our application (I run IT for a top 100 e-commerce site that does a very substantial amount of uploads in the holiday season; we choose to self-host several dozen TB and have an emergency overflow possibility out to S3 if we fill up our in-house storage).
I can't see how storage costs are meaningfully sub-linear, and bandwidth costs can be due to bulk pricing, but are still first-approximation linear with upload size. (You might argue that you can use 95/5 pricing to work around that by forcing users to schedule their uploads for an off-peak time, but then you could do that in the base case as well.)
I would love to hear more about your surprises in the model, either on HN or privately, as this represents a substantial portion of my budget, and if I'm missing something, I'm not too proud to change course. :)
I was going with 4x file size and assumed that bandwidth for images is linear in file size, aka no bulk discounts.
One of my points is that IOs have a cost too, a cost that is largely independent of file size.
To first approximation, disk IO capacity is proportional to the number of disks. (Yes, some disks, especially the flash ones, support a lot more IOs/sec than others.) If you're IOs bound, you either have spare disk space or can probably increase the amount of disk space at a sublinear price. (1.5TB drives are <3x as expensive as 500GB.)
For some data transfers, AWS has a "per operation" charge in addition to a bandwidth charge. The latter is proportional to file size but the former is not.
My application has a lot of processing costs. Most of them are on metadata, not the images, so they don't grow with image size. I also do a lot of stuff with "thumbed" images - producing them is a function of file size but storing them and moving them around isn't.
My model is different from yours in at least two ways.
(1) I'm estimating some things.
(2) I'm using AWS and GAE prices. (I'm assuming the highest prices because if my app is getting enough use that I'm getting bulk discounts, I've got other problems.)
If I had a model that tracked my actual experience, I wouldn't listen to some bozo on a website....
FWIW, data in a db is significantly larger than the actual data.
Our bulk storage disk sees very little in the way of IOPS-requested. (An entire Gbps pipe couldn't fill the IO capacity of 4U of the 1TB SATA drives we use for bulk upload storage, and we have way more than that. ;) ) DB and hosts disks are another story entirely, and I have to admit that we don't really account for all those costs as "upload related" (by and large, they are not upload-driven) so we have some model inaccuracy there as well, but for every 2MB file we have on SATA, we probably have 20-40K in thumbnails on faster disk and well under 1K in fairly narrow, and not heavily indexed DB rows on 2 tables.
As for listening to a bozo on website...well, HN is by and large not bozo-filled, it was pretty clear you weren't one, had given some thought to this problem, and I'm more than ready to admit when I'm potentially able to learn from someone else something that might save me/my company money.
It does sound like your app has substantial sub-linear cost components, and I admit ours has some smaller ones as well but that we just don't model them tightly enough to see those components.
Thanks for the info, and I wish you the best in your endeavor(s).
I would agree that niche, if at all, is the way to go. Niche of the upper upper pros, who already pay for Flickr pro but find it limiting.
It happens, from time to time. Welcome to the Internet, version 2.
Also you have to remember that its a standalone service, so users will get value from day 1. So just throw up a good looking user interface and first time users will sign up to try it out
Good luck!
Or, in other words, there is always room for new startups that do the same thing. Just do it better or differently -- have better crust, better toppings, faster delivery, free breadsticks, etc.
As you said, "there are always people who are looking for a better solution." You just need to make it.
Every new pizza shop adds tangible value to the system. It has a physical presence and sells a physical good that fulfills a basic need.
A web shop, without marketing, adds basically zero value to the system. It's not like you can "walk by" and discover that it provides something. And I don't think any pizza shop bootstrapped its business by offering pizza for free until it got a critical mass of popularity.
The message makes sense, but the example does not.
Plus, a brick-and-mortar store owner has higher fixed costs.
Sure you can, organic traffic.
The analogy isn't, "web business are just like pizza shops!" Rather, the sentiment that I think Allen was communicating is, "in _any_ business, there is always room for competitors and new ways of doing things."
I wish I could remember the link to the podcast so you could hear it in the exact context.
This is why Friendster was forced to focus on China and give up hope in US.
YouTube's competitors had a hard time moving in on mass-consumer video (they were forced to go white label or focus on businesses, monetization, or analytics) due to the push-pull effect of YouTube's entrenched publisher-viewer community (and their network effect of widgets scattered across the web).
Kijiji positioned dramatically different than Craigslist (100% ad supported and much better UI) and it was seeded with a different audience (all the inactive eBay users were spammed giving it overnight critical mass).
SmugMug does a terribly good job and its not clear what angle you would take in entering their market. They have scale (300K paying users) and killer customer support (which is critical for their target customer who typically lacks technical expertise) and can outprice folks looking to replicate their offering with a significant incremental improvement to their service.
What angles to entering the photo-sharing market do you folks see?
that photo stuff we hear about from time to time, like face recognition or stitching together photos or turning them into videos or building 3d models of landmarks from tons of user photos... are any of those on photo sharing site yet?
They've even outdone themselves with the iphone app for example.
I imagine this working something like S3 except that it knows about images, so it can process/resize them (and provide APIs to control such things) and also include a bundled CDN service (CloudFront). The pieces are all there but an API that made it really easy to put images in, process them and get them out again would save a lot of time.
(I manage a high traffic blog network and am spec'ing out some image-heavy niche web apps/sites. I'm eventually going to have to build something like this for internal use -- wish I could just buy in now).
So yes, there is room for another photo sharing service.
I want the hires, the digital negative, to be able to pair a digital negative and a jpg... so that's the first class stuff.
But I want the current attributes of a photo on Flickr to be first class... time and place matter. In fact, a photo is an attribute of a moment in time. And so it should figure out when multiple people upload based on a shared event that the uploads are happening at the same place, and it should then work out from the timestamps when it was, so if anyone adds a geotag all matching files are implicitly tagged unless overridden.
I want to search photos like tineye.com does... provide a photo as a search token. I want to find "similar" photos to the one I have... did someone link to a photo that belongs to a set, how do I get back to that set? How do I widen the search to find other photos from the event?
I want to be able to get the original or negative, regardless of the size, if it's a CC image.
I want to be able to background upload. If the images are local, then they're magically going to be published too.
I'd like an auto image stitcher for lo-fi gigapan-ish images... select the ones to be stitched and go for it.
Lots of things really. There's so much room still.
You can always find room in the market for a better mousetrap, provided you have a good idea of how the mousetrap needs to be improved.
If you're talking about a premium/freemium service that is targeted at pro-sumers, then maybe. SmugMug and others (myself included) have shown that it can be done profitably. It's just that with a paid service, you reduce your market considerably (no one wants to pay to upload their halloween party pictures).
But I think there are new markets to explore for paid services. Just depends on who you're trying to reach.