I see a lot of image hosting websites that look out of the box. Can these sites actually be profitable?
Trust me theres no point becuase 1.THERES LOTS OF IMAGE HOSTING SITES 2.THERES MORE FAMOUS SITE THAT PEOPLE USE EVERY DAY.
You must understand why users go to those websites in the first place. Is there any way to monetize that behaviour. E.g. Looking for travel photos ->Sell travel packages?
There isn't very much money in the space - most traffic and such goes to the long established and popular sites (ImageShack, PhotoBucket, etc). On top of that...depending on how often your ads are clicked, it may actually cost you money to run the site (depending on bandwidth usage, etc). From personal experience, rarely do people actually click on the ads, it may be an issue of relevance - but I find that most simply just want to perform their action (upload), take their URL, and leave you in the dust. I mean I'm sure you could try to start a site, but for my money and time, it's almost best to look elsewhere.
It kind of sucks really.. I've spent several months writing a highly optimized script from scratch for image hosting with loads of features in my spare time. I think I might just give up on it or just sell the script. It had options for multiple servers (eg. img1.domain.com img2.domain.com) and other stuff. Depressing really
The market sucked to begin with. This is the same crap with people wanting to start the next MySpace, do they even realize MySpace has lost money every day since it was started? Digg, same story. Facebook, yep negative. You have to find something that is instantly profitable to spend your time or you will be very upset.
It is not profitable nowadays because of the huge competition . There are a lot of these sites . I don't say you cant make money but the amount of expected earnings in the field is not really good to start a one .
Find a niche. Make it scalable. Have enough funds to be around for years without income from it. The big ones all did that; you need something to make money and that something takes a lot of users and traffic. I built and am running Picturepush and that is profitable. Notice though it is not easy; you need advanced software to run it (we wrote Infiniscale to be able to forget worrying about scalibility) and it took 2 years of hard work to get it were it is. If you don't have the tech knowlegde, money or stamina, I would forget about it, especially if you are running one of those standard things that are just a simple upload box and nothing more; they require about 100% uptime otherwise users leave and that is exactly what you cannot deliver if you do not have money and resources to build some real software.
How many ads have you ever clicked on while using one of those sites Add in the site space and bandwidth to host the stuff and... I don't think so.
thanks you guys for the input - i decided to give it a shot, but it's not goinig to be one of those standard scripts. please check out millepix.com
how people use the hosting site? step 1 sign up, step 2 active, step 3 upload, step 4 get link, step 5 show picture. i am always believe we can do some special in any step.