[Need Advice] Image Hosting Business

Hi Friends,

I'm planning to start an Image Hosting Business soon and have already begun working on the site myself. I know I'm a bit late in joining the bandwagon, but there's always some money to be made on the net.

So, I need some advice regarding :

1. Hosting : Should I start with my 4GB / 70 GB Reseller ? Or get www.netfirms.com/max, dreamhost or any other ?

2. Script : Simple, imageless CSS based or extensive, feature rich (most of it wont be used, I know) ?

3. Accounts : All free or free and paid modes ?

4. Monetization : I have decided to use Adsense and Chitika initially. Any good alternatives, supplementary ad services that has been proven to be working for image hosts ?

5. Promotion, Marketing : Need some proven solutions or plans that can be carried on by myself at minimal cost.

6. Any other advice ?

 

3. Unless you're offer something new and great, your best bet is to go free. There are so many alternatives out that there are free, that few people would join unless you site had a new great feature for paid members. Go free and hope to get some money with ads.

 

1. I would think that that might be sufficient to start with but look for a provider which would allow you to scale up as and when needed in terms of disk space and bandwidth. When you get popular, it is possible for you to incur a lot more in terms of the above resources.

3. I don't see any harm offering both free and the option to upgrade to the paid modes. if it cost you anything to implement that then go with that option. Who knows when you gain in popularity, people may pay to use your service.

4. I would think that the other option might be to consider selling ad spots on your site, either life time or time-limited spots.

5. I supposed the regular banner exchanges, link exchanges, submission to search engine, adding the links to your signatures. then there are some forums which you probably can advertise your service for free.

6. I would think that the market is quite saturated now and in order to survive, you might want to consider a niche market. Maybe offer it to the MySpace community. Some people do not have websites and MySpace only allows up to 16 pictures to be uploaded so the need for image hosting might appeal to them.

 

Take it from me. If you have the word Paid on your website, no one will stay.

An outdated version of my image hosting, I used the Pay-Free model with unlimited bandwidth, guess what barely any uploads.

Now that I used the free one, too many uploads I had to cut on straight image display.

Also insure that the images are not removed (unless it does not abide by TOS) because it will make people lose hope, one person can make a difference.

Also you might want to consider some free options as:

Microsoft Image Publishing Wizard
Right Click upload on IE/FF
Toolbar Upload

there are other things like album management and flash upload you might want to consider.

Peace,

 

Many Thanks...

More suggestions welcome...

 

Forgot to mention, I am currently working on a plug-n-play free image hosting site, incase you are intereted:

http://www.free-php-scripts.net/P/Free_Image_Hosting

Peace,

 

Thanks, I'd be using your script.

BTW, if it had a feature to prune images not acessed for last 30 days or so, it would have been good.

 

hi azizny, here's what I made out of your script :

http://imagefox.net/

suggestions, reviews welcome

 

Contact Me , I can help you.

 

in what way can you help me ?

 

I have many features that I would add in the future, I'll add yours to the list. I am still working on the "downloader" then i'll start to revise all three scripts.

The site design looks pretty, I like the Chitika box.

Peace,

 

Seems lots still have interested in imgae hosting business. One of my friends does too!

 

Image hosting is not super profitable, but as part of a portfolio of sites can bring in a few extra $$ each month.

I run 2 image hosts, and I no longer advertise them at all.

1 host is a free/paid model and as it caters for a niche it does quite well (makes me over $50/mth) while only using 1gig disk and about 15Gig data. If you can find a niche then it is possible to gain paying subscribers. I typically get 2-3 new subscribers each month.

Now, my free image host site can burn about 15Gig/day (typical month is around 100Gig) and typically uses a bit over 1 gig of disk space. I started it off using a very popular turnkey script, but over time have customised it considerably - adding heaps of functionality and features. I have a reasonable TOS and "prune" uploaded images after a month regardless of their last access time. Now, I don't make much from this site, typically less than $25/mth, BUT as it offers a complimentary service to a couple of my other sites, it is a valuable piece of real estate to me, in terms of cross-promoting my other sites.

You do need a good TOS when running an image host, you do need to find a niche or an angle to run it from. YOu will need to devote a fair bit of time to get it started, and you will need to spend a bit of time managing it each day.

I believe that it is possible to still do ok with an image hosting site but it will not be anywhere near as easy as it was a year ago. A lot of image hosts come and go, the typical life of an image host is about 4-5 months. A lot of people start them, and when they realise it takes a bit of work to run them, and they can eat a lot of bandwidth, they often dissapear.

A quick google for "free image hosting" reveals 59 Million sites. I am lucky enough to be on page 2 of that list, but don't rely on google to drive traffic. In all honesty, last time I looked at the SERPS i could not find my site in the first 10 pages, so I guess that in the last few months quite a few Image hosts have dissapeared.

As long as your host is tolerant of potentially high traffic spikes you should be fine to start an image host with as little as 20Gig B/W as long as you can grow.

 

Great advice, rrwh.

I'm still exploring options for the script to use as azizny's script is still in beta...

 

I run pixjet . net and basically it's all about marketing. The most used image hosts are run pretty horribly with ads all over the place, while the good providers are left with minimal traffic.

Find a good script to use, then concentrate your efforts on marketing the site. While they aren't the most profitable websites, they are a good backburner website to have running while concentrating on further projects, I should pull in $50-60 for this month alone. They can be quite resource hungry (in terms of disk space). Also, don't disable direct hotlinking (if you plan to at any stage) until you have a large regular user base.