Could Flickr and other sites based on grassroots content have to dump some of Grandma’s photos and other items in time? Even at the risk of kissing off eternal permalinks? That’s the possibility broached in a Silicon Valley Watcher post by Tom Foremski, a former reporter for the Financial Times.
FlickRs and the rest may not be able to grow new markets enough to pay for hosting costs, he says. A debatable thesis? Well, we know that storage prices are headed download, so I’m not sure. So what about bandwidth costs? I’m welcome comments? Your thoughts? Could it be that we’re dining off a feast created by over-expansion during the dot-com boom?
The e-book angles
What about the e-book angle? FlickR-style sites are catnip for people looking for Creative Commons art for books (although remember there could be issues besides copyright, such as modeling fees). What’s more, some e-books in the future would be harmed by the ditching of permalinks they reference. Also, what about future multimedia e-books that supposedly are to be stored for free forever? Let’s hope Foremski is wrong. Meanwhile here are more details from him:
“Companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits. They will have to dump the data, dump the grandma photos.
“That means dumping the many links that users created to their content. The idea of permalinks, links that will remain rooted forever in the concrete of the Internet, will become a fallacy.
“Even though the online companies make no guarantee in their terms of service that users’ content will be always available there is an implicit guarantee that user content will be always be there. When that implicit contract is broken users will be less willing to spend all that time uploading and tagging their content.
“They’ll be less willing to tell their friends about it, to post links to it, etc, because there is no guarantee it will be there next year or beyond.
“That’s the scenario that will dry up the flood of user generated content to online firms. And that is the great flaw in the business of the Long Tail.”
Even without bandwidth costs considered, there are other reasons for users to beware of excessive reliance on corporations for storage. The company just might get tired of offering a service and want to try something else; just look what happened to the Yahoo 360 bloggers.
Thought: Will Grandma be able to preserve her peralinks by paying a subscription fee? What happens after she dies? Will the estate set aside money? Will executors will have to worry about vanishing links? This is one more argument for a library model to augment the commercial options.
Technorati Tags: FlickR,Tom Foremski
I saw that too. Weighed in:
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/the-long-tail-a-lie/
I thought Mike Cane’s analysis was pretty good. Note this quote from the SVW,
“As the number of long tail micro-markets increases, the less profitable each one becomes. This is because each long tail micro-market competes with an increasing number of other long tail micro markets.
More of any product or service means less revenue for that product or service. A current example: more housing on the market means a lower price for housing. Same thing applies in any market.”
Of course all of those competitors are also simultaneously helping drive down storage costs with all of their large purchases of disk space.
That said, I wouldn’t trust grandma’s photos to a server I didn’t control. Hosting is dirt cheap these days and likely to continue to spiral downward. Most people who post to Flickr, however, seem to do so in large part to enjoy the benefits of the network effect there which also act to keep competitors out…. until someone comes up with an open, widely accepted method to tie everything together without having to use Service X and then those folks are toast.