Photoblog 2.0: Transition to Subscription Based Accounts
With the start of 2009, Photoblog.com has experienced a large increase in traffic. Our server costs have grown significantly in the past year, while the economic downturn has continually taken a toll on our advertising revenue (which is the primary way we are able to keep our service online.) In the past months, we've begun to realize that we have two options:
1. Shut down the service
2. Charge a subscription fee to use the service
Since many of our members have invested years of hard work into their photoblogs, we have done everything in our power to avoid shutting down the service, including paying for losses out of our own pockets.
We project that with the current trends of growth, costs, and revenues, we would be forced to shut down the service within half a year unless something changes. Thus, we’ve decided that we must start charging a subscription fee in order to stay online.
A little background:
There are currently two people on the Photoblog development team: Michael Zhang (myself) and Mike Zupan. I am currently a computer science student at UC Berkeley, and Mike Zupan has a full time job in New York City. Since launching Photoblog in 2004, we’ve focused on service and community rather than profitability. For example, rather than pollute Photoblog pages with banner advertising in obtrusive but profitable locations, we’ve chosen to use contextual advertising in unobtrusive locations in order to keep photographs the focus on photoblog entries. Though this meant significantly less advertising revenue, it was almost always enough to cover the expensive hosting costs.
As the number of photographs we store for members has increased, costs have increased as well, while advertising revenue has stagnated and fallen. Our current system of covering costs with textual advertising is therefore unsustainable.
Within the near future, we plan to begin charging a subscription fee to use the service, rather than placing advertising on photoblog pages. The fee will be very reasonable, and comparable (if not cheaper), than other photography services. It should be around $2 a month.
While many of you, especially the newer members, might object to this change, there will be many benefits in addition to the fact that it will allow us to continue to offering this service.
1. Having accounts be subscription-based means accountability. People will no longer be able to register multiple accounts to spam or harass our community.
2. The service will become sustainable, meaning we should be able to provide the service indefinitely.
3. Mike Zupan and I will be able to focus even more on developing a quality and reliable service for our dedicated members, rather than spend time on meeting hosting costs.
4. Member photoblog pages will have minimal or no advertising.
5. Members will have much more ownership over their content and the content they wish to post.
6. The service will be faster and more reliable for our subscribers, since traffic and storage will be much less.
7. Members will be able to customize their blogs more, possibly with custom CSS and/or Javascript.
Many of you might be wondering what will happen to your existing accounts if you choose not to become a subscriber. While you will not be able to post new photographs, we will not remove your existing content as long as you simply log in once a month. This will allow you to consider subscribing or transitioning your photographs to a different photoblogging service.
Members who have donated to Photoblog will be able to have their donations credited towards subscriptions.
We apologize for any inconvenience this major change will have, but it is the only option we have in order to keep this service online. Thank you to all the members who have supported us for the past four years, and we hope we can offer you an even better service after we transition to Photoblog 2.0!
To discuss this blog post, please visit this forum thread.
Some answers to questions raised in the thread:
Q: Why has the site been down so much lately? I've not been able to access it many times in the last few days.
A: The new year has brought with it a massive increase in traffic, and we do not have the resources to improve our hardware. We have closed registrations to new users until we can sort out this issue.
Q: How can I sign up?
A: The service will continue in its normal form until the new system is ready. It could be days, weeks, or up to a couple months.
Service Connectivity the Past Few Days
Due to a large spike in traffic during the holidays and new year, Photoblog has experienced some intermittent downtime during the past few days. We're working hard to address this issue, and temporarily closed off registrations to provide better service to existing members.
We should have the problem ironed out by Monday. Sorry for the inconveniences, and thanks so much for your patience!
Here's for forum thread for community communication:
Happy New Year
Light Up The Sky
Hats
New Account and Storage Policy
Due to issues regarding the cost of keeping Photoblog.com online, we have implemented a new policy concerning photoblog accounts and photo storage in which inactive accounts will be removed from the service, including all the data associated with that account.
If any user does not sign in to their photoblog account for a month, they will receive an email warning them that their account risks being removed for inactivity. If they still do not log in for another month, their account will be removed from the system.
Hopefully this will allow us to better meet the needs of photobloggers who actively use this service to share their wonderful work.
If you would like to offer comments regarding this, please visit this forum thread.
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