Image Uploading websites: competitive business?

Is the internet world saturated with image uploading sites?
Would it be wise to create one, or would it be a waste of time, energy and money?

 

I started a free image hosting site a few months back, with no promotion it has made no money. You'll probably want to try to find a small niche if you want to succeed.

 

Same here (see signature). I mostly made mine for an easy place for me to upload stuff...

 

its small money but very easy

 

It is a pretty saturated market place and google adsense payout is pretty low on these types of sites.

 

It's easily saturated with quantity. However, I beg to differ that it isn't with quality.

Right now, two come to everyone's mind when you say anything about image uploading - ImageShack and PhotoBucket. PhotoBucket is great, and would be very hard to top it - BUT - ImageShack? I'm sure if you market correctly, you can make a much better host with a much better design/feature status than ImageShack, and many others.

I am personally opening one soon, it's a free script, however (with permission) will be heavily changed and redesigned, and I will try to market much better than ImageShack and all the other 'mediocre' sites that nobody really knows about.

To answer your question as straightforward as I possibly can - I think if you make a superior image site, know what you're doing, promote and market it very well - you can succeed.

 

Ok first of all there is 1 new image hosting site that comes up daily and most of them eventually die. Even if u manage to get traffic to your image hosting website there are NO good chances of making revenue. The amount of bandwidth used is gonna be really high. So if u ask me I'd say the image hosting business isn't the way to go around....

 

i get 3k uniques daily on mine making me $2 profit daily

 

And $2/day is pretty good for a site that you don't even have to do anything with. Plus, I am sure you could get more.

Honestly, it IS saturated.. But it depends on your site and what you offer whether it will survive or not.

 

In my opinion, nothing is ever saturated. If lots of people are doing it, its considered to be saturated - but if it really was, everybody wouldnt have been doing it in the first place.

While making imagehosts, people here are not looking to compete with imageshack or photobucket - they just build one which a small group of people know about, use and make small profit - its a numbers game(like with proxies).

If you want #1 on google for image upload, forget it coz it aint gonna happen. What you should do is find a niche market, promote it and see the money trickle in(dont expect to make shitloads from it though)..

So you want to make a few $$ per day from your imageupload site? Heres the free ebook, courtesy anions.

1. Get an image upload script from somewhere(you can get it cheap from B/S/T).

2. Get a good and easy-to-remember domain(.com preferred) with the word image/pic/upload somewhere.

3. Get good hosting with ample disk space and contact your hosting provider to make sure he wont delete your files, and that he allows image uploading sites.

4. Install the script and do a custom header image to make it look good (or get it done for $5 here)

PROMOTION:
When you start off, you will have to upload the images yourself(dont expect people to start using your wonderful site). For this you'll have to find images. You can buy the $2 image/wallpaper collections sold here, or get some from a warez site(doesnt matter - no ones gonna catch you). If you are into all the being ethical bullshite, then this might not be for you.

5. So now you got the images ready? Upload them to your site then.

6. Hit a couple of teenage forums where people exchage wallpapers/sexy pics and suchlike.

7. Start making threads about your pics and post them as thumbnails, so people will have to click them to view them - taking them to your site

8. Make sure you have adsense/adbrite or whatever PPC your using on the image pages.

9. Make a total of 100 threads or so on different forums and watch the money trickle in - again this methods wont make you a millionaire, but its good for making some extra change if you have the time(like most people here).


ALTERNATIVE METHOD

10. Go to a torrent site and grab a few classic/latest movies.

11. Upload the movie to megaupload/rapidshare. Hit some warez boards and post your download links. Now take screenshots of the movie and uipload them to your site. Post them as thumbnails along with the links - you'll get 1000+ hits for every movie that you upload.

12. You can also do this with porn movies and share them to porn warez forums. This might even get you more hits, but the downside is that you wont be able to use adsense.

Thats about it. You might even find better ways as you keep doing this.

Its too much work for way too less IMO, but still workable for those who want to make 10-20$ per day, have lots of time, and dont know much else.

All the best

Anions

 

As someone in it... I say it is saturated... or pretty damn close. But I don't care.

If $2 a day is actually considered good, then I guess I am doing well with this. Mostly I just leave it up for the convenience of myself, friends, and family.

 

Yes it is saturated but it's not too late to join and make a dollar a two. Will it be worth doing it in a couple years though? Probably not.

 

^ anions, you're great! rep added

btw, what's the best premade script out there? anything for sale or free. Something that's proven secured, SEO friendly and those with attractive "most viewed" and "recently uploaded" tumbnails? Can someone point me to killer script?

Thanks in advance

 

It is saturated, but that doesn't matter too much. It is like free hosting, file hosting, image hosting; they all disappear after 2 months; the ones that stay actually have technical knowledge (and are not; 'with cpanel I can be a linux admin' people which cannot do anything when something goes wrong) and they do make money. There are a lot of tiny, unknown ones that are around for a long time; they make much more than $2/day. Quality and patience are the only thing you need to make anything work; http://www.cimples.com/2007/07/06/be-persistent-the-3-year-run/

 

So how much does picturepush make you daily?

 

Not much (about $50/day) but that is not really an image upload script and it is not making that from ads

We are just starting to get a partnership with a bunch of photographers who going to get hosted versions of the system for their companies; they are already using this to show their portfolio's to (potential) clients. Then revenue will jump. But we have 2 years to go to make it profitable (it is little over a year now and I firmly believe you cannot do anything in under 3 years; well, anything ofcourse, but not too much).

I have a profitable freehost though; people don't believe that that is possible anymore either; it was killed by a very well sold Layeredpanel ebook.

 

I bought an image hosting script for $30 because I loved how fast it was. I threw it up on a site with a fairly relevant domain, and let it sit. I still need to improve the look of the site when I have some time, but it makes a steady $1-2 per day or so.

 

you will need to advertise - most people will now use tinypic/photobucket

 

I have an image hosting site, and really recommend that you stay away from it. the market is saturated and lots of spam stuff gets uploaded and you will cry paying for the bandwidth and server crashes like me.