Well. Their main audience was pirates. A group of people that dislike being bothered by intrusive ads, dislike the threats to their privacy that ads pose, and prefers to not pay for access to files because information should be free, or at least prefers to pay as little as possible for access.
It’s kind of a wonder that Zippyshare lasted for so long actually.
At least they outlived both the original MegaUpload and the original RapidShare.
> RapidShare was an online file hosting service that opened in 2002. In 2009, it was among the Internet's 20 most visited websites and claimed to have 10 petabytes of files uploaded by users with the ability to handle up to three million users simultaneously. Following the takedown of similar service Megaupload in 2012, RapidShare changed its business model to deter the use of its services for distribution of files to large numbers of anonymous users and to focus on personal subscription-only cloud-based file storage. Its popularity fell sharply as a result and, by the end of March 2015, RapidShare ceased to operate and it is defunct. As of 2017, Rapidshare AG was acquired by Kingsley Global.
For me it's all about the access. I happily pay for Usenet access and indexers because it allows me to have a single interface for accessing all media. I don't have to play the guessing game of "which streaming service is this show / movie hosted on this month?". I just hop onto Sonarr or Radarr and it's on my NAS ready to stream in a few minutes. I still pay for Netflix and I get Disney for free from my cell phone plan so if it's outside of those I'll reach for Usenet.
I don't have any hard numbers, but I would assume that their userbase was significantly tech-savvy compared to the general population, so the percentage of visitors using an adblocker would have been higher as well.
"Well. Their main audience was pirates. A group of people that dislike being bothered by intrusive ads, dislike the threats to their privacy that ads pose, and prefers to not pay for access to files because information should be free, or at least prefers to pay as little as possible for access."
Exactly, the crime is infringement, it is not theft, and it certainly is not piracy.
On the subject of the term piracy, if you are going to pick a heinous crime to represent your infringement, you might as well call it software rape, it is closer to what you are actually doing.
The term "piracy" has been in use to describe copyright infringement since at least 1736. Three centuries should be enough that we aren't "picking a crime to represent your infringement" anymore. It's just a valid word for the thing.
By this logic killing someone is simply a movement of physical matter from one place to another (knives, bullets), followed by some more movement of physical matter from one place to another (loss of blood/organs etc.)
Things hold more value than simply being a sum of its parts.
How do you figure? I think it's fairly obvious where the distinction is from stealing (the original owner no longer has their property) and copying (the original owner still has their property). The murder analogy you laid out doesn't seem to track with that at all.
Every analogy that has ever been trotted out is way off base.
It's not theft, it's not "piracy," and if we're going to liken it to murder or grand larceny we may as well go all the way with it and call it "terrorism."
No, copyright violation is and always been an act of forgery.
Literally: the act of producing an unauthorized copy of a document, work of art, [etc.].
That's a better word for it perhaps, if you see the act in a negative light.
Even then, doesn't forgery entail presenting the work as if it were an original? It's not quite the same if I make a copy of something where 'originality' doesn't apply and it is a 1:1 duplicate. Maybe NFTs will fix this ;)
> doesn't forgery entail presenting the work as if it were an original?
They do, but here's where analogies become incoherent or inapplicable. Mind that "original" doesn't have to mean "master copy;" many business models (like software) trade in authorized copies.
You don't buy ownership rights to movies-- you're buying limited exhibition rights (do they still put the FBI warning at the beginning of the DVD? I haven't seen one in years). Even when you buy the DVD, you don't really own anything other than a permission slip to show it to a half-dozen people at a time, in your own home.
Thus, making unauthorized copies of a movie amounts to forging new licensing agreements, where future licensees are not accountable to the rightsholder.
Maybe the best analogy would be an NDA-- "we'll show you this movie this one time, but you can't record/copy it and show it to others." Nobody is sympathetic to the lamentations of corporate media lawyers and their contractual disputes, thus, we get lame analogies about stealing your car to try to make their struggles relatable enough to dissuade the behavior.
Making a copy of the work (or data) without compensating the author of that work denies them the remuneration that they should ideally get for putting in the effort to build that work.
Now, you could always make the argument that creation of value only happens when a physical artifact is built, but that would also be a general argument against white collar jobs and make it okay for corporations to not pay a knowledge worker such as a software developer or a technical writer, simply because they provided a copy of their work.
If I'm not willing to pay a creator for their content, it must not have any value to me. Or atleast not what they were asking. So if I copy it, I'm not depriving them of payment for the value they provided really, since I believe the monetary value of it is near $0.
If you have a painting and are asking $1000, and I take it, you lost the $1000 you probably would have made eventually. If I take a look at it, I didn't steal $1000 from you. If I photograph it, I still didn't steal $1000 from you. If I print it out at home and put it on the wall, I still didn't steal $1000 from you.
> If I take a look at it, I didn't steal $1000 from you.
> If I photograph it, I still didn't steal $1000 from you.
This is where the inductive logic breaks down, because you are unlikely to make a perfect substitute (in other words, copy) of the product by simply looking at it, but by photographing it, now you can, which means you have denied compensation to the author of the work by being able to produce a perfect substitute.
> If I'm not willing to pay a creator for their content, it must not have any value to me.
If it doesn't have any value to you, why are you making a copy of it in the first place? :)
A photograph is not a perfect substitute for the painting made by the artist..... It's not on the same medium, and we know it wasn't made by the artist. Or are you implying I can sell a photo of the monalisa for about as much as the original since it's the same?
That’s a narrative about yourself that you tell yourself, and it might be true about you, but it’s not true about everybody. If pirating didn’t exist then some % of pirates WOULD buy more stuff. Unfortunately we don’t have great ways of differentiating people who can’t or won’t from those who would. But many people who would pay also love free stuff, so you can’t conclude takers of free stuff would not pay. And in aggregate this opting for free reduces creator compensation; hence the charges of theft.
That's the problem. A human body is not replicable in the same way that data or text is. The concept of ownership breaks down in the digital world. Storage is cheap, lives aren't.
For murder to be comparable to piracy, it'd have to involve materialising a dead copy of a person who then keeps on living their life, possibly without even being aware. For the most part it'd just be creepy as shit and violating, but fairly harmless past that.
How is it theft if the original still exists? If I copy your words above verbatim and send it to a friend, is that theft? Your comment will still exist unless dang deems otherwise.
It might be costly or undesirable to the producers, but that's just a problem with digital media. Enforcement is always going to be difficult unless we invite 'rightsholders' to control our devices.
But that's besides the point. If a law is unenforceable, it doesn't really matter. You could create a law mandating everyone wear green socks on Tuesdays, and see how many people comply. Or (looking to what is as you wish) how many people enjoy a puff of a joint despite it being illegal in most places?
Or remember the US banning the export of cryptography algorithms? How well did that go?
The state has guns but even they have limitations if I decide to copy a few words off a page in private among my friends. Same if I send them a few bytes using HTTP/SMTP/whatever.
Many parts of the internet are filled with people who feel entitled to steal the work done by other people without compensating them for it. HN is no exception.
The Native Americans sold New York in a consensual deal - not that one theft begets another, even if they hadn't.
I mean, not that I personally have a problem with New York returning to Native ownership, but it's both (1) wrong to claim that it wasn't purchased in a consensual deal and (2) completely and totally irrelevant to the problem of digital piracy and entitlement to the work of others.
This kind of logic makes me believe that pirates can't be reasoned with - that theft is a core part of their moral framework - but only when it benefits them, of course. If they perceive that their employer isn't paying them what they're due, it suddenly becomes a huge problem.
I run https://pixeldrain.com. I have been seeing my ad revenue dry up over the last few years as well. Even though the site only grew more popular the ad revenue stayed low. At the start of this year I decided to try running the site without any ads at all. Pixeldrain is now funded by patrons on Patreon. It's working quite well so far.
Zippyshare could probably have been made profitable. Maybe it went against their ideology, or they just couldn't be bothered.
> Pixeldrain is now funded by patrons on Patreon. It's working quite well so far.
I'm glad it's working for you. The internet really needs a better business model than advertising. I always mention patronage as an alternative and it's awesome to see successful examples.
Definitely! I really despise ads. I'm really happy this business model is working out. Even if only one in 200 people join the Patreon it's plenty to be profitable.
Ads were fine until they started to get wild (popups, redirectors, malware, worms and the list goes on) then everybody started using adblockers or else internet browsing was completely impossible. So ads killed the ads market. Now subscriptions are going in the same direction, pay a subscription for an app or service i will use once in a while? No thanks I’ll find another way to do it.
I bet ads were extremely profitable when Zippyshare started. The market has shifted from banner ads to video ads.
As for me: I didn't know what the alternatives were when I started. The ad revenue was enough to bootstrap the growth cycle. Now I don't need the sidewheels anymore
> "Over the past year, electricity prices have gone up 2.5 times, which, with a large number of servers, gives a significant increase in costs that we have no way to balance."
They could have reinvested the earnings in the past to run a more cost effective solution to prevent this happening today. I have seen this countless times where companies will just drain the business of cash and leave everything knowing it'll die eventually in the long run.
They had options like reducing the max file size, the number of files, the retention period, etc. They hadn't posted a blog outlining any plans or features for ~6 years.
Or, put another way they built a successful business and it funded their retirement. Businesses are built by people and don’t literally have a life of their own. Maybe the people enjoyed the revenues and have moved on to their life outside this business and the cash flow is no longer worth the hassle. Seems like a happy ending to me. But, I’m also not as ambitious in business as I used to be and see things differently in my old age.
The way these sites usually work is that there‘s a small group of people uploading a lot and distributing these links everywhere (All the piracy boards). That‘s what gets people to your site and in turn ad impressions.
Getting rid of your top uploaded will not be beneficial to your bottom line.
But it’s fine for a business to end. Owners are not obligated to fight a losing battle until they’re overleveraged and bankrupt. Often those measures make failure come faster. Pull a salary while you wind down and wait for the candle to burn out.
It's incredible gymnastics we've seen business leaders achieve in the last 3 years. I can't tell you how many times I've heard the numerous renditions of "we're struggling because of SARS/Russia/Energy/Supply-Chains/China/Trump/etc". Not once have I heard "we're struggling because we focused on big bonuses and dividends instead of growth and business security, and we are seeing the repercussions of that". Poor preparation leads to piss poor performance. Basic business acumen.
While very true, sometimes failure/shutting down/bankruptcy is a deliberate decision as it maximizes profit elsewhere. <the latest crisis> is just an excuse to save reputation for an action a large portion of the population would view as pure greed void of morality. Its fairly common in the startup world in the form of being acquired by companies like amazon/google/microsoft and then shutting down not long after. The acquiring company gets many benefits from this including substantial realized tax losses (among many other tax opportunities), accelerated absorption of assets (or cash if they liquidate), customer relationships, and valuable employees, etc. This can be especially profitable for large companies during poor economic times as they can acquire at usually significant discounts.
So basically ad blockers? For all the evil ads are, they do keep a lot of such small businesses running too.
Now that we've reached a point where every person has some form of adblock from abp to brave, I think this we're gonna be seeing more and more of this.
P.S. I recently cancelled my Kagi subscription too after their recent price hike and search restrictions. So businesses that don't show ads but charge the user directly are also struggling too it seems. Guess doing business nowadays isn't that easy.
> Now that we've reached a point where every person has some form of adblock from abp to brave, I think this we're gonna be seeing more and more of this.
On the upside of this, there is an insane amount of flat-out terrible web content that would become unprofitable if ads truly become no longer viable. Blog spam, content farms, click bait, etc.
Blog spam will continue to be profitable since all the LLMs have reduced the cost to churn out ok quality texts very quickly. Previously they'd have to hire freelance writers at like $0.05 per word on the low end.
forcing everyone to use LLMs. until LLM companies start injecting subtle ad content into the answers.
See it already knows how to do it. By the way it recommends against it.
Contextual Advertising: Chatbots can use contextual advertising by analyzing the conversations to understand what users are discussing, and then provide ads that relate to the topic. For example, if a user is discussing travel, a chatbot could provide them with ads for travel packages.
Personalized Recommendations: Chatbots can use machine learning algorithms to understand user preferences and recommend products that the user is likely to be interested in. For example, if a user frequently talks about health and wellness, a chatbot could provide them with ads for vitamins or supplements.
**Product Placement: Chatbots can subtly promote products or services within the conversation itself. For example, if a user is discussing a particular product or service, the chatbot could mention a related product or service as a suggestion.
I predict that LLMs will kill off search engines, taking blogspam with them. Blogspam has been steadily eroding the value of search results for decades, choking out genuine websites like garden overrun with weeds. When people finally stop using search engines entirely all of those blogspam sites will cease to be profitable, unable to even pay for their hosting, they’ll disappear from the internet.
It will also likely make all online news subscription based, ending the vibrant discussions that we have here and elsewhere on social media. Canada is already considering charging websites for links to news media.
Although this may not be all bad though, companies could come together to provide subscription bundles. There's also Apple news and the likes, but news media typically have a hostile relation with big tech.
They don't block affiliate links so instead of content that is useful outside of selling you something directly you get more content geared toward directing you to buy something.
Ad networks have no one to blame but themselves. For years, they have served up all sorts of malware, autoplaying media, and browser crashers. The very reason I started using Firefox way, way back when is to get access to an adblocker because I was sick of my system being compromised by just going to a website.
Even now, with my adblocker off I would have a hard time finding the real search result or the real download button. Usually, the most prominent element on a page without an adblocker on leads to spam or malware. And I'm just not interested in figuring out what is real and what is not when an adblocker solves the entire problem for me.
Sometimes I feel guilty about using an ad blocker on sites I like. A few times, I've felt guilty enough to turn it off for a site I use a lot and trust, only to find the page completely clogged with ads that block the UI and generally make an awful experience. At this point, I've learned my lesson.
Not to mention that malvertising is still an issue that affects even major sites. In my view, browsing the web without an ad blocker is like hooking up with strangers without using PrEP - it's just not a good idea.
The main problem with static ads is that the advertiser can't obtain any analytics as to whether their ads are effective, or whether the publisher is outright defrauding them by claiming to show ads but not actually displaying them to real users, faking the number of clicks, etc.
With newspapers and magazines, picking up a copy and estimating the distribution of the paper via a 3rd party (such as Nielsen) answers all these questions.
I'd like to hear about a solution that addresses that. It seems fundamentally incompatible with the conditions of "hosted locally" and "static images or text" (which means you can't run JS to verify whether the ad was actually displayed).
It depends on the ad and what you're measuring. If it's eyeballs then yeah, you can be lied to. If it's a conversion happening on your own site then no, you can't fake that.
> If it's a conversion happening on your own site then no, you can't fake that.
The problem with this approach is that it's a "he said, she said" situation where both parties can claim that the other is producing fraudulent numbers. It can only be resolved with litigation, which is not what anyone wants when all they wanted to do is get some sales numbers up.
Also, if you're familiar with the state of advertising fraud, faking conversions with botnets and residential proxies are an absolutely real thing.
What would you do if all of your favorite sites switched to subscription models? Would that be a win in your book? Always honestly intrigued by such world views.
> What would you do if all of your favorite sites switched to subscription models?
I have very few truly "favorite sites". Most of them are completely disposable. Eg, I don't see myself ever paying for a website that provides song lyrics -- it's a fully optional service, and entirely fungible.
I think it's possible a limited return to an "old internet" model to some extent, where some random person might just posts lyrics of their favorite band just because they like it.
For the very few actual favorites, probably.
> Would that be a win in your book? Always honestly intrigued by such world views.
Extremely so. First, no ads. Second, a site that must please its users or go bankrupt. That's a win/win in my book.
Such a change likely comes along with improvements in the site's quality. Eg, paid Youtube competitors don't want to feed me hogwash all day in hopes I watch more ads. Bandwidth is expensive, they're not getting any more money from me, and there are no ads to pay for increased consumption. So their priority becomes a smaller amount of high quality content.
In practice it seems be go subscription, and then make things that used to be free to everyone require not just the basic subscription but a premium one.
I always took "information wants to be free" as a "water flows downhill" kind of statement -- it describes the natural tendency and that you need to do a lot of work against it to contain it, and even then it's probably not going to be fully successful.
It's not about what "ought" or any sort of morality, more of a factual statement of how the world works.
> Sometimes I feel guilty about using an ad blocker on sites I like. A few times, I've felt guilty enough to turn it off for a site I use a lot and trust, only to find the page completely clogged with ads that block the UI and generally make an awful experience. At this point, I've learned my lesson.
I don't get it. The sites that you like will go bankrupt, and you won't be able to read them anymore. Or do you have an agenda, and you are okay to sacrifice the sites that you like?
If I like a site, and I want it to exist* I disable my ad blocker, and bear with the ads. But probably we visit different sites, or I have a higher tolerance against ads.
* my morals have gotten so low I would happily steal from the people that provide me value, but I won't do that because I am afraid they will close their businesses
> I don't get it. The sites that you like will go bankrupt, and you won't be able to read them anymore.
Well, if I turn off the adblocker, the resulting deluge of ads makes that site a site I that I don't like, so it doesn't really matter to me whether I can read them anymore because it won't be in the set of "Sites I Like To Read".
There are many more people who want their content be read, even for free, than there are people available to read that content.
Because we have have oversupply of content, a significant quantity being good, is there any reason to expect that the price for that content will not be driven downwards?
It's why the majority of competent artists don't make much money from their art and have a job in addition to their art: there's an oversupply of guitarists, painters, sculptors, poets, authors, singers, dancers, songwriters.
Currently there's also an oversupply of blog sites, news sites, news aggregators, learning resources (How to code sites, recipe sites, etc), with the most popular ones being the ones which had the most capital (for SEO, blog-spamming, etc) to get the most visitors, and that capital is grown by degrading the quality of the site with ads.
I imagine a net where the amount of capital you have means nothing because ads don't make a difference to the bottom line, and every site is a net expense. This would result in only very cheap sites, which means mostly static hosting (because it's cheap).
If the people who care to make money of the site but don't care about the content can't make any money, the only ones who are left are those who care enough about the content to take a small hit to publish that content.
I think as blocker prevalence is a lot lower on mobile, especially iPhone, but that’s less helpful for a bulk file sharing service where I’d expect a lot of desktop users.
The thing that made me switch from Chrome on iOS to Safari was that I could easily install an adblocking extension through the app store onto vanilla safari.
Probably okay, I think the overlap between adblock users and obscure filesharing site is much larger than between adblock users and people who use online photo editors.
Even my completely non-technical SO has switched to using Brave for recipe sites. She can handle ads everywhere else, but recipes have gotten so egregious her hand was forced and she now uses Brave exclusively as a recipe browser.
Look into something like Paprika [0]. Nowadays I barely look at the website, I just import it to Paprika (works automatically 99.9% of the time, no input needed from me) and then never visit the site again. It has the added benefit of having all your recipes being consistent and the ability to make edits.
From my experience from years ago, once the ad revenue reached certain threshold, it was limited or reduced afterwards to never reach that threshold again.
For instance, website of someone I know was growing and at one point got £1500 from ads in a month. The next month it has dropped to £500 and never gone over £600, no matter how big of the traffic was hitting the site.
That was revenue for about 500k monthly unique users (EU, UK, US, no dodgy traffic).
It's like an artificial cap was placed on that account.
Finding companies to advertise directly was difficult, because they already used established platforms and were reluctant to deal directly.
Kagi charges 5 dollars a month for 200 searches and 1.5 cents after that. You end up paying to use 10 different search engines api fees plus give Kagi a fee. Crazy pricing for the value offered.
Hmm. I do about 200 searches a day on Google, so that would be $92/month.
I'd pay for the service if all search engines charged that much, because search is so useful. But in that world, I'd be more cautious about searching casually, for the same reason I limited online time back when the main cost was per-minute dialup phone bill. (Not in the USA.)
I don't like the ads on Google, but unlimited casual searches any time of day is very appealing.
> Now that we've reached a point where every person has some form of adblock from abp to brave
I don't. I've never used an ad blocker.
If I don't like the ads on a site, I don't visit it. In a lot of cases, ads are a minor annoyance. Most of the time they are fine (to me). In some cases (Youtube, for example) I pay to not see ads. That seems fair all around.
I have never had malware or any of the other stuff people claim to be the reason for using ad blockers. I feel like I just live in a different world from everyone else.
Ads that are rendered server-side and don't have client-side tracking would be fairly resistant to blocking. Either seek out their own advertisers like it's 1998, or proxy ad networks so the content looks indistinguishable from their content.
Ads are bad for many reasons, but one thing that does unmentioned is that Google's actual payouts have declined enormously since 2010 or so. Advertisers ramping up the number of ads you see are doing so because Google got greedy.
Good. If if needs advertising to stay afloat, it probably shouldn't even exist in the first place. I'd block ads in real life too if I could get uBlock Origin into my glasses.
Plenty, usually in the form of individual websites selling ad space on their website, just like newspapers sell ads in their paper issues. No user tracking necessary, and if you sell based on time you don't even have to track impressions or clicks.
But that doesn't fit the "apply to our whitelist" model of many "ethical" ad-blockers.
It's a perfectly valid position to take that we'd all be better off if people weren't allowed to effectively pay for things with their attention. You just need to be OK with the corollary that if you can't/won't pay money for a lot of content/services/etc. you'll just have to do without. I suspect we'd see more innovative payment services but I also suspect that a lot of things would just go away and the Internet would be much more the domain of people who could afford to pay lots of money.
> "we'd all be better off if people weren't allowed to effectively pay for things with their attention."
Recently I got an advert like "unsold camper vans being sold off cheap in UK". It's the kind of Taboola/Outbrain title that I didn't believe was true but I was watching some camping content[1] and I clicked the ad. Who knows, maybe it would be interesting to see how much they were discounted and maybe it would support the site I was on. It took me to a page of 'best searches' which had nothing to do with camper vans or any specific sale. The searches were things like 'biggest car dealership uk'. I clicked one, it took me to a Yahoo! search for that generic and unrelated search term.
I have no idea what created any 'value' anywhere in that. Who paid someone to make a website with generic searches to Yahoo!? Who paid someone to run a lying advert pointing to an unrelated link to a Yahoo! search?
Who thinks that "my attention effectively paid for something" in that couple of minutes is real and not laughable delusion?
[1] I have no intention of buying a camper van, so even if the ad was honest and accurate it wouldn't have added any value to anything. Point is, it wasn't, and most ads like that aren't.
The interesting thing is that I pay for some services directly in order to avoid advertisements, the big one being email. Did zippyshare even offer a paid tier? I could see myself paying for a file hosting site that did not feed ads to me or the people downloading the files.
I'm glad to see more push back against ads and the toxic ecosystem that it brings with it.
Oh, I'm not against advertising, and never claimed to be.
Nothing wrong with people or companies letting me know about things they are selling that I might even like.
But a) the majority of advertising we see for big companies is not needed and b) my point still stands that if you can't make money except through web ads, you don't have a solid business model.
>if you can't make money except through web ads, you don't have a solid business model
It's probably true that a huge number of sites providing online content without a paywall don't have a solid business model. They'd probably mostly go away absent ads though and subscriptions for those with a paywall would increase.
> It's probably true that a huge number of sites providing online content without a paywall don't have a solid business model. They'd probably mostly go away absent ads though and subscriptions for those with a paywall would increase.
IMO that would make the Internet a much better place.
How many sites do you regularly read that you wouldn't mind paying $1 or 2 for?
I don't mean big sites like HN or Reddit or whatever, they are not going anywhere, but a ton of small kind of specific sites, they are going to have to turn to that model.
Look at the amount of sites that cover say MCU movies, most of them only exist because of ad money, not because people really enjoy their writing and insights.
My comment there, the short version is just over two years ago, various advertisers on there went mad with hard core porn ads.
Additionally here I'll add that I dug back into comments around two years ago, I was told some links were also pointing unsuspecting users into malware sites ... so I guess anyone (the average user) who had to use a zippyshare link basically if they were smart, had to use protection.
Hard core porn on sites used at work, or something kids would use is ... the epitome of what not to do.
I think but can't be certain, for the longest time zippyshare formed a bridge between forum users to share photos, private collection of info links and notes -- file sizes were generally not large, but not suited for emails. Indispensable really in some forum types to be able sent via private messaging information, charts and pictures. No doubt like everything, the service was used for piracy in the beginning as well ... but it has only been the last few years where I've heard some sites actively using the service to share something that replaced the tv.
Advertising can work but as long as it's honest and appropriate to the user base.
I think it was Kickass pirate site that went mad for hard porn as well ... I knew it was only a matter of time it would be deemed time for the service to die off, not many people like the idea someone's preteen kid could looking for something, run up on such stuff.
I recently visited Imgur after a few years away. My god has that site fallen. Doing anything takes two or three times as many clicks, ads are everywhere, and 75% of the posts are left-leaning versions of your uncle's shitty political Facebook posts. "Upvote THIS if you think Trump should be arrested!"
> "Upvote THIS if you think Trump should be arrested!"
Oh boy, wouldn't that be a paradise? A 21st century version of ostracism: if enough people upvote something on social media, they can get you arrested.
> Over the past year, electricity prices have gone up 2.5 times
I wonder if the people who constantly yell about the obvious superiority of self-hosting over cloud can internalize this information. The costs of hosting your own computers has often increased. Cloud costs, so far, have only gone down.
When they launched them 13 years ago, EC2 "micro" instances cost 1.4¢/hr. Today, they are twice as large, much faster, and cost 0.53¢/hr. In real dollars, the instance cost has declined 73%, and more like 95% in specific throughput. Meanwhile colo prices have gone nowhere but up.
> The costs of hosting your own computers has often increased. Cloud costs, so far, have only gone down.
If that's true, it's only true because cloud pricing was highway robbery to begin with.
Hurricane Electric (who I chose simply because they always put their price online--other colos should take note) is at $400/month for a cab & GigE. It doesn't take very many online servers to put that in a rounding error. In roughly 20 months, you win against the cloud even if you count CapEx.
And, do remember, the cloud companies all charge egress by the byte. Sure, most people don't care, until they become successful and suddenly wind up with a $10K bill in a month.
The "cloud" is useful two ways:
1) Pop up servers quickly
However, this is should be "I use servers and can transfer them to another provider quickly if I need to." Any provider should work as well as bare metal.
2) Lean heavily into specific services on in the cloud provider.
The goal here is that you are cheaper specifically because you don't have a fixed "baseline" that you are always utilizing. In this way, you are completely relying on the fact that the provider can shuffle things to be uber cheap.
Unless you are suggesting that Amazon is getting free electricity, then must be either:
- Profiting enough from micro instances to pay for the electricity of running them. If so then when you get to using a server full of micro instances you can save money by doing that yourself and not paying Amazon's profit.
- Eating the loss and subsidising it from other income. This is convenient for you but not anything to do with the cloud, more to do with the power of a huge company.
- Big enough to have arm twisted a fixed price for a long time ahead, pushing the extra cost onto the supplier, so the supplier will go bankrupt and be bailed out by the taxpayer. Again convenient for you but nothing to do with the cloud.
- Other? What's your explanation for Amazon not charging customers more despite rising energy costs?
You switched "self-hosting" to "colo" which aren't the same things. One can imagine a big non-tech company negotiating fixed prices on their power for their datacenters. One can imagine a big non-tech company investing in regular server refreshes to converge down on more power efficient servers over time.
Its quite sad that ad-blocking is framed as killing this business. Surely it's more akin to a subsidised business failing to move to a more sustainable model? Don't get me wrong I love free no nonsense business models, but as Google and Facebook have shown us, ads are only part of the equation. If we didn't collectively lose trust with the ad industry, and ads weren't so intrusive, I for one (and many others I've spoken to) wouldn't be blocking ads. I go out of my way to disable ad-block on friendly websites and blogs that need the ad revenue; sites that have a responsible and ethical policy surrounding their ad usage. Zippyshare seemed like one of those sites. Unfortunately the rest of the industry had to ruin it for them.
Even more sad, this will become the norm and sites will have to move to a paid subscription type model to keep their services alive.
I welcome a paid model for all sites, honestly. That way, sites aren't slaves to the ideological driven policies of the advertisers. Post something the advertiser doesn't like? Ads get pulled and the site loses money. When you pay for the service, the site owner can raise their middle finger if anyone outside of the site staff doesn't like content on their site.
Sites like YouTube are a perfect example of this. Constant censorship and other nonsense because many of their advertisers are American, and thus 'prude as fuck' (lack of a better term). So content on YouTube has slowly been becoming more and more squeaky clean (advertiser friendly).
In a few years, YouTube's content policy will be 1:1 with broadcast television. Fuck reliance on advertisers. Eventually, any monetized content online will need to be squeaky clean and society will move onto another model, which is hopefully a paid model.
P.S. The idea that content will only be paid for by the golden 18-24 demographic with disposable income (while excluding others) is a myth. If kids can beg their parents for Fortnite skins every month and get Epic Games up to 5 billion in revenue per year[1], then $4 per month to stream content for a streaming site in the future is very possible
Then they are slaves to the customers. Post something the customer doesn't like? Customer leaves and the site loses money. Incentive is for the content to become family friendly low detail low effort lowest-common-denominator because that appeals to largest range of potential customers.
> "Sites like YouTube are a perfect example of this. Constant censorship and other nonsense because many of their advertisers are American, and thus 'prude as fuck' (lack of a better term). So content on YouTube has slowly been becoming more and more squeaky clean (advertiser friendly)."
You think YouTube could skip the advertisers, sell directly to soccer moms, and then have porn adverts and swearing and raise their middle finger, and that would work?
It isn't just standard ad blockers being used to access Zippyshare. A whole lot of the content is .part files or similar. People share links and run them through specialized downloaders, wget etc. in order to grab all the part files from a link, skipping the ad interface entirely.
At one point this was a specialized use case (I think) but I get the feeling that over time this became the norm. As such, I think most of parallels people are making to general ad-block use and the Zippy is based on a bad premise.
However I'm not puzzled by this. The speed was always fast, and they didn't employ any strategies like a lot of the other OCH which made downloading a huge PITA.
RIP Zippy, one of the best filehosters with great speed and no noticable limits between downloads
at least there is still Uptobox with very reasonable limits on free accounts (30mins between files and 30 seconds wait time + pretty big file size) and Mega (no waiting, but ~5GB per day)
Conveniently Mega only limits you by IP address, not account. You can just swap VPN locations and keep downloading. 1fichier is also pretty incredible.
You should try out https://filepost.io (Disclaimer - I own it) I do feel for zippy though. Even for my site, Ad revenue has completely dried up and infrastructure costs now outweigh my revenue.
I run https://pixeldrain.com. At the start of this year I completely removed all ads from my site. I'm done with checking ad network after ad network only to find out that they all pay the same: pennies.
Pixeldrain now runs on subscribers over at Patreon and it's working quite well actually.
Zippy was cool for mp3s, cracks, plugins, books and smaller files. Then dropbox, google drive and many others came that had no ads and larger file size limits BUT with an actual business model: upgrade to pro/plus/premium etc.
Too bad, I grew up using Zippyshare to share my bootleg remixes to fans or school files to friends. Awesome website of his era, just like Megaupload or Megavideo. RIP.
It’s a bit sad that in 2023, with dirt cheap SSDs and gigabit internet at home, we still default to using some third party hosting for transferring files.
There is a difference between file transfer and file sharing. Do you want to know what is sitting on your SSD that's been uploaded from some IP address in Romania?
"are still homes with" is doing a lot of work in that sentence; Cable is by far the most common home internet and plans typically top out around 30mbit. Some places still have DSL as the only option and that's single-digit mbit uploads.
There's fiber in my town, but it doesn't reach my house yet and reviews are middling at best, with outages being regular and lasting for hours.
Somewhat ironically, the only time I've had a symmetric broadband connection was in a flyover state. I live 2 miles from the Pacific ocean and am stuck with the same "Cable or DSL" choice that much of the country has.
Since 2006 we have been on the market in an unchanged form, that is, as ad financed/free file hosting. However, you have been visiting in less and less over the years, as the arguably very simple formula of the services we offer is slowly running out of steam
…
Over the past year, electricity prices have gone up 2.5 times, which, with a large number of servers, gives a significant increase in costs that we have no way to balance. There are still a bunch of smaller reasons [for closing down], but we could write a book on this, and probably no one would want to read it.
Sounds like visits are down and costs are way, way up.
What is sad is that ad-blockers would have never become a necessity, had advertising remained fair (as in: static images, no code execution on browser, no tracking).
Your comment doesn’t make sense. What profit motive? It drove them to shutdown and people to use ad blockers. The feedback loop is positive: behave well -> profit. Your comment discusses the inverse: behave poorly -> go to jail.
The profit motive in question is the motive to fill your screen with shitty, laggy, possibly dangerous ads. Have you visited your local newspaper's website, or a fandom property, lately?
Once enough people do that, the users install adblockers, which also hurts advertisers who were not filling your screen with shitty, laggy, possibly dangerous ads.
The problem is, we don't have laws and courts for ads. That's why we are all forced to walk around heavily armed and shoot down whoever gets less than two metres apart from us!
Why not convert it into a SaaS? Have a B2C option that is pretty cheap and then a more expensive option for businesses. This would massively reduce the usage of resources, which is a good thing given that they seem not to be able to pay for the servers, traffic and storage. With 45 million visitors you have huge potential for converting leads into paying customers.
I don't understand - is it not possible to construct a site that does not allow you to download if you have an ad-blocker? It seems trivial:
1. Show an ad, include a special value.
2. Download only if special value is present.
3. If special value is not present, tell user they must disable ad-block to download.
Most sites fail to do this not because of technical complexity, but because they don't care about ad-blocking and/or it doesn't affect their business greatly. In ZS's case, they should've implemented this.
I chalk this up to poor management tbh. Things like the electricity cost increase could have been balanced with more ads to compensate. The kind of things on ZS tend to be nefarious, and the electricity needed would likely be offset by say, a 15 second video being watched before downloading.
It really isn't this simple, no. I remember a number of years ago someone tried to do this. Pardon the language, but the "product" was called "Fuck adblock" I believe. It was a piece of JS that you could include on your site that, if I remember correctly, tried to see if certain JS objects existed. If they did exist, you could disable aspects (or the whole thing) of your site. Very soon after, someone released "Fuck fuck adblock" that essentially disabled this piece of JS.
It was a cat and mouse game for a while, but ultimately, if you want to detect if someone is using adblock, you need to do it in JS. And then the ad blockers will just add that piece of JS to their block lists.
Sure, but it's much easier to be on the defensive here rather than the offensive. And it implies your site is popular enough to warrant anyone reverse engineering it anyway.
Since the adblocker strats are necessarily public, you could even have a system to automatically monitor them and apply a set of composable tweaks which breaks the current public release.
Any website that uses admiral or any form of anti adblock gets an instant nope from me. I get that websites get paid for running ads, but when ad companies have no curation and start pushing ecchi mobile games and refusing access for not disabling adblock, I can take my browsing traffic elsewhere.
There are ways to detect certain kinds of ad blocking but they're not always reliable. The client web browser has no obligation to report back to the server with what it's decided to show the user.
I used to want to try and make something that would render ads to a virtual dummy screen, so anything that would check for them would show them as being present, but no user would see them.
Speaking for myself only here (but I suspect I'm not alone), I don't use an ad blocker to primarily block visual ads (although it's a nice side effect).
I use an ad blocker to block tracking networks and protect my privacy, and one of the end results of that is that visual ads get blocked.
So I can't imagine a scenario where I'd need to fake-render the visual ad, since the ad code never has the chance to get that far.
For sure, I actually love this idea in theory, it's super clever. :-)
I was just pointing out that it's unlikely we'd be in that scenario, since this approach feels like it would imply letting the ad JS run, but tricking it into thinking that an ad was displayed. Or am I missing something?
If I understood correctly, that means the ad's JS would still run in the background and run any included tracking code, which is what I think a lot of people try to prevent with an ad blocker, more than just hiding the visual ad.
Oh, I see, I think I misunderstood your previous reply - my apologies! And thanks :)
My thinking is that the visual and tracking ads are often one and the same. Much tracking is invisible and many ads are well-behaved, but I would say most visual ads are tracking ads also.
For me, as much as I care about tracking and stuff, it's been really nice not seeing basically any ads on my web experience for the last 10 years, so I think really I just wanted to attempt to 'end' the cat and mouse game. At least for a while.
Essentially: It doesn’t scale. I wrote a small adserver for our website, and I also detect if ads are blocked by simply fetch-ing the google ads script (which we also run because some agencies require it). When they are blocked (or if there is no GDPR consent, same thing from our PoV), we only deliver ads that only depend on our own servers (we have several partnerships with merchants, so we can show their product ads or our own products, simple HTML with images).
But all that only works, because it’s only active on a single website and could change in any way we want in minutes. If it were widespread, it would quickly be blocked, and changes would have to be replicated by everyone using it.
Rest in bytes zippy. Yes I used it since forever and w/ an adblocker. I wouldn't mind turning off the adblocker for such good(no throttling usually) and free services if they wouldn't have >intrusive< ads that make the web experience cancerous.
Instead of having popups just put "normal" ads on the sides if you really need it. Sadly the web trend went for the popup or other malicious ads (imitating legitimate buttons/other elements from a page) which makes users like me use an adblocker shamelessly.
I know this goes against everything, but why not monetize using the proven subscription model?
With 45m visitors a month if you converted .5% of those to stay at $5 a month you're making $1.125 million a month.
It seems like there's a pending backlog of lawsuits that the founders have likely maintained their distance from the platform for. Nobody, no matter how rich you are, throws away a golden goose.
I think directly monetising a platform that is used, among other things(lol, let's be real), to distribute copyrighted materials illegally would put them in some very hot waters.
There are some sharing companies out there, that could rename themeselve and use that service, but, would they make millions with that to pay the domain?
Buyers wont be paying much, if any premium right now unless there is a significant asset that is very valuable to multiple businesses (very much a buyers market).
Its likely that shutting down before the next big bill hits (end of month?) then liquidating is most profitable route since it appears that it is operating at a loss. Im sure there is residual value here, but probably less as a whole.
If there is lawsuit risk, buyers may prefer dissolution of the company and just aquiring its assets instead.
I guess it depends on your user agent. For me, and I believe the majority of users, after clicking on your second link ending in `.jpg`, it redirects to the first link where there are ads.
It’s kind of a wonder that Zippyshare lasted for so long actually.
At least they outlived both the original MegaUpload and the original RapidShare.
> RapidShare was an online file hosting service that opened in 2002. In 2009, it was among the Internet's 20 most visited websites and claimed to have 10 petabytes of files uploaded by users with the ability to handle up to three million users simultaneously. Following the takedown of similar service Megaupload in 2012, RapidShare changed its business model to deter the use of its services for distribution of files to large numbers of anonymous users and to focus on personal subscription-only cloud-based file storage. Its popularity fell sharply as a result and, by the end of March 2015, RapidShare ceased to operate and it is defunct. As of 2017, Rapidshare AG was acquired by Kingsley Global.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RapidShare