What do you guys think? Clearly we have some establishes sites - i know of ImageShack and TinyPic... but is there still money to be made in new sites?
This has been discussed before. It uses alot of storage and bandwidth, and needs a nice system to get the ball rolling. Startups will be expensive, and returns will be low.
In all fairness, something that has been discussed before might be viewed differently today. Or maybe it simply ends up a "copy". sorry. It's weird because I still see new ones popping up. I find it so odd, especially because almost all of the copies don't offer a single thing the main ones don't... so I don't understand how any of these others become even partly profitable
I think that most webmasters open the following sites: image hosting, proxy, gaming, forums and blogs. Seems like every single webmaster has one or thought about it. With image hosting you can still be good but you need to have a unique site. Offer something new or just have a lot of money to advertise it. I have an image hosting site myself. About 2 months old now and close to 3000 members. I dont make much from it but i've done an image hosting site before..had it for 3 months and sold it for $2000. I might not make much but i'll find someone one day that will buy it.
why not, you can always earn money from the image traffic that you will get from google! make a rule that the images that are to be used, are to be hiperlinked, so that you get backlinks! image site will consume a lot of bandwidth, but then i belive there is profit there. cheers!
There's always money to be made in any market. What differs is the levels of whatever entry barriers there may be.
You just need a plan. Don't think that you're just going to open an image hosting site and people would pour in and start hosting images with you. Photobucket has 36 million registered users and gets about 85,000 per day. If you look at those stats you can see that there are 85,000 people per day that still need image hosting and sign up. If you can convince them to join your site instead of photobucket then you will succeed. Now thats only 85k that sign up for photobucket..think about how many sign up for imageshack each day. There is still a lot of room out there but you just need to advertise your services. Have some kind of plan on how you're going to get people to join your site. hit up all the social networking sites and forums.
I'm not a webmaster yet,but i'm sure you can get decent $$$-$$$$ with it. There's some market that has yet to be explored.So build your empire there,it's easier! ex:make a image hosting site in a specific region or country where it wasn't popular yet (you need to make some research tough) If you want to gain share in a global market of course it will be harder but it's possible
The internet is very large and ever expanding. start one up, advertise it offline and in different niches. or just be an adult host who offers hot linking lol.
He might also end up not being able to afford the bandwidth bill, not to mention getting DMCAed/sued by the righful copyright owners of the content he'd be publishing.