Image Hosting Sites Profitable?

Are sites like Photobucket and Imageshack profitable?

Do they make money from the paid memberships or through advertisments?

What about the people who have their own image hosting networks, how are they working for you?

 

I've got an image hosting site, and no it's not profitable. With a ton of traffic then sure, but your going to have to offer people something they can't get anywhere else if you want their loyalty.

 

I agree with mdvaldosta. If you want image hosting to become a profit maker, you need to make your hosting better then the top dogs. With some time and thought it can happen.

 

adult images are making $.

 

I'm not sure what you consider "profitable" but I would definitely say I'm making money. It's all relative I suppose. My hosting costs nothing, so it's all gravy. 25% actual registrations, 75% advertising. 75 - 100 uniques a day. Making < $400/mo.

I couldn't care less if anyone actually pays to use the service truthfully.

J

 

Thanks Jester. By profitable I guess I do mean just make a 0 balance

It just seems to be advertising, etc wouldn't exactly work on an image host, as people are looking at the images.

 

I'm 100% sure they are making $1000s a month. The problem is that the market is saturated. And the biggies have it all but locked up. You certainly won't get rich, but you can make a little green.

J

 

No user pics are viewable to the general public on my site anyway. I didn't want the casual picture browsers........

J

 

may I ask how much you make off the pages that display images, and not off the site itself?

 

Depends. The Puppy Gallery, which was added because of the incedental traffic I got because of the site name.... very little. Google doesn't pay alot for dog ads.

The rest of the site does well with YPN. "Well" to me is anything over $10/day. I hit that goal 80% of the time.

The Picture/Image hosting niche is HORRIBLE for adsense. I mean bad. Image hosting advertisers don't like to spend more than the minimum per click. So I dropped A/S off most of the site and haven't looked back.

Does that answer your question?

J

 

Yup. So I guess Yahoo > Adsense Which is why most of the bigger ones are using Yahoo

 

OMG yes, without a doubt. Who knows for how long, but yes.

J

 

Hmm..well it seems I can't get a Yahoo account because I'm not from the US