https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli...
Disclaimer: I wrote it
When one service becomes poisoned (as you described it) - I move to another service. Once upon a time that was Imgur, followed by puush, followed by minus, followed by pomfse, and now I use vgy.me and mixtape.moe (when vgy.me's servers go down, which is rare but happens). There are no shortage of image hosts around to choose from.
Your writeup is right on the money. It isn't a service that scales well and any monetization tends to lead to users dipping to greener pastures. Imgur being a strange exception.
Itsosticky was designed from the outset to be an image sharing service with community potential, contrasted with image hosting, it's a service that facilitates quick sharing of an image or screenshot with a friend or group.
When used for its intended purpose, direct sharing, as opposed to free hosting for hotlinking, there are features that make it worthwhile sharing an Itsosticky resource URI rather than a direct link to an image file. For example, zoom capabilities, that some people may find superior to those available natively in a web browser, albums and easy social sharing links, and not least, fast uploads from phones without the need for a dedicated app.
All users are invited to publish their images to the gallery for greater social participation or exhibition.
When I started building Theneeds, we wanted users to be able to post, like in Twitter. And soon, we wanted users to be able to attach photos or other media.
For media in the sense of an url that we then embed/display it's relatively easy. And even easier if you pay for an external service like embed.ly to do the job.
For images it's a mess. We had to take care about uploading, resizing, posting async to s3, invalidating caches, and of course displaying. If I had to do that again, I'd surely look for an external service (that I didn't find at that time).
Maybe this is a viable way to monetize? I guess that there are quite a good number of companies that need upload+display of UG images, or at least that they could do it if it was easier to plug in.
Just for reference, embed.ly costs 20$/mo for just display, so I guess you could at least ask for that + storage costs.
Next, you could add additional services such as cdn support, or anti spam/copyright infringement/adult content/etc.
Itsosticky is a brand new image sharing service with some ambition, just launched after a year of development.
More info is available here https://itsosticky.com/about
There are several things that make this different to other image sharing services. Itsosticky will quickly and automatically rescale images that are above a certain size threshold, with auto-orientation of JPEGs uploaded from phones. The layout is fully responsive, allowing for consistent URIs when shared across devices. It's light weight, with no advertising technologies.
Many of the images currently displayed in the gallery are simply placeholders dropped onto the site by helpful beta users, and there are surely bugs to address here or there, but by and large, Itsosticky is ready for use.
Thanks for taking a look. Feedback from mobile devices would be particularly valuable.
Please upvote if you think this service is worthwhile and deserves to go somewhere.
I don't know anything about the author but if he worked on this nights and weekends for a full year it seems about right to me (and great job)!
Though, maybe I'm not 10x enough to know better. :-)
I believe this is your answer (from the About page):
> Almost every piece of code is ad hoc, built from the ground up to be as lightweight and efficient as possible.
My opinion is they most likely built many things which were already available in the open-source world.
This is my favorite part. So many sites start out this way, then become slow, unresponsive and bulky. Here's to hoping it stays slim and quick.
It's not blocked by my company firewall yet, so that's nice.
Scroll down, scroll back up, scroll down again.
