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by smacktoward
2376 days ago
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This was my question as well. SmugMug presumably did their due diligence before making the acquisition, they should have had a decent idea of what it would cost them to operate Flickr even with the old unlimited-storage model. So I was surprised after they made the acquisition to see them abandon that model and delete tons of images users had uploaded to the service in good faith -- it seemed like the cost of hosting those images was something they should have factored into their planning. But if that's what it takes for them to keep the service up and running, I figured, maybe it's an acceptable sacrifice. Now they come back a year later and say, whoops, we can't make the math work on this thing even after deleting all those photos. Which makes me wonder if the math ever really worked -- if they ever had a realistic plan for operating this service at all -- or if they just saw it was up for sale cheap one day, and bought it without really working out the business end of the equation. Statements like "[w]e didn’t buy Flickr because we thought it was a cash cow" make me suspect it was the latter. There's also a weird dissonance in this appeal that gives me pause. If you're writing a message about how you're struggling to break even, you probably shouldn't trumpet how you've moved the whole system onto AWS, a notoriously expensive hosting option for things like static images. And statements like "Unlike platforms like Facebook, we also didn’t buy it to invade your privacy and sell your data" come across as vaguely threatening: "nice community you've got here, it'd be shame if we had to monetize it." |
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Second, one can’t always know “if the math works” because untested models depend on people. While Yahoo/VZ could have run tests to predict uptake, in a transition like this, there may not be the luxury of that level of market research. Entrepreneurs are regularly called on to make calls absent enough data, and have the character to course correct with candor. I think we’re seeing that character play out here.
Last, much larger revenue Internet services than SmugMug/Flickr are all in on “notoriously expensive” AWS/S3 as well, some with budgets that start with a B. What do they know that readers here might be missing about the TCO of ‘things like static images’?
For one, “notoriously expensive for things like static images” may be misunderstanding the value of a single image to its owner. To them, that image may be “priceless”.
When dealing with a set of images as an emotion archive rather than as a static image CDN, losing any single image should not be an option.
Static “image hosting” services lose images on a regular basis. S3 by and large doesn’t lose objects. If I could only have a single copy of something in a single place, I’d want it on S3. In that “you had one job” category, S3 is a game changer at a remarkably reasonable price.
Regardless of one’s opinion of S3, comparing tables of features may be missing critical differences that don’t manifest in that feature table, differences well worth the expense relative to other costs or opportunity costs.