Fotopedia is shutting down

http://blog.fotopedia.com/fotopedia-shutdown/

by uptown • 12 years ago

57 41 12 years ago

blog.fotopedia.com

sp3328• 12 years ago

Wow - only 10 days notice!

opendais• 12 years ago

That is probably a cut off of some kind. [e.g. Not enough $$ to pay for their servers]

sp3328• 12 years ago

Yeah, but this is not their data, it belongs to their users. It would have been better to communicate before now.

poopsintub• 12 years ago

Better than nothing? I hate to say it, but I feel like I could slap an ad on their website/photo stories as-is, and make a decent amount of money. Not to mention, their apps. are free. I'm not sure if that would outweigh the server costs for hosting high-quality images though.

arb99• 12 years ago

Never heard of it before, but its homepage - http://www.fotopedia.com/reporter/magazine has lots of great pics.

And http://www.fotopedia.com/reporter/stories/CxVE4flM6pA is pretty good

jonnym1ller• 12 years ago

This is really sad news to hear, especially after having put 6+ years into building the photo-encyclopedia and community of storytellers. But there are still other great storytelling platforms out there to give a home for Fotopedia's orphaned stories! Exposure.so focuses on photo narratives Cowbird.com is a great place for personal stories (and is funded by their community), Storehouse is good for visual storytelling on the iPad, and also the visual storytelling platform Maptia (full disclosure I'm a co-founder) at http://maptia.com – our team is already working hard to get a special import feature ready for Fotopedia storytellers – please email us at saveourstories@maptia.com if you're interested in joining our community and would like to use our import feature to preserve your stories!

bitJericho• 12 years ago

Can you please provide this data to Archive.org or work with them to save this data?

dublinben• 12 years ago

sp3328• 12 years ago

According to the (brief and possibly outdated) Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fotopedia they support CC licenses so that the photography can be used on e.g. Wikipedia and vice-versa.

And public posts in a public forum are usually considered fair game, especially for non-profit archives. Archive.org has a long history of legally defending this, although they do respect polite takedown requests and robots.txt. http://www.fotopedia.com/robots.txt

toomuchtodo3• 12 years ago

Already talking to Jason/ArchiveTeam about it.

sp3328• 12 years ago

Are you affiliated with the site and in a position to provide the data, or just scheming to grab as much data as possible before the site goes down?

niutech• 12 years ago

Or just upload them all to Flickr/Google+ Photos for free.

dewey• 12 years ago

Never heard of it before, I do like the map feature which is showing you pictures close to your location. [0] How were they going to monetize it? I can't find any information on the site but I think exposure.co's [1] pricing is pretty good. It's pretty much the same business (I don't know about Fotopedia's story editor but the one exposure is using is amazing) and they are charging for it.

[0] http://www.fotopedia.com/reporter/map

[1] https://exposure.co/

hyperliner• 12 years ago

What was the original intended business model of Fotopedia?

anon1385• 12 years ago

What was the original intended business model of Fotopedia?

Get bought by Google, Facebook or Yahoo.

ulfw2• 12 years ago

Same as all consumer businesses without any monetization model whatsoever then.

chanon• 12 years ago

It looks like they had/have an free iPhone App. Did they even try putting ads in it?

No ads or subscription options on the site either.

reinier_s4g• 12 years ago

As many here never heard of it before but it looks like an awesome service and looks like they have an active community, wondering what went wrong? anybody? and again what was their monetization approach? We can all learn from that.

superasn• 12 years ago

Those pics are beautiful and very hi-resolution. They do have a story to tell.

SmugMug may not be directly related but they make a fortune by giving sellers the options to sell live prints of their pics, paid galleries, etc. Also AdSense on free accounts cannot hurt either. I'm sure there must be a dozen different ways like this to monetize the site (unless of course the site costs a million dollar per month to run)

tommyd• 12 years ago

Really sad to hear about this - I love their iOS Apps, "Wild Friends" and "National Parks" in particular - beautiful photographs and I love the story telling aspect and frequent updates. I'll have to have a good look through them again before they stop functioning. Hopefully the content can be archived somehow - ideally in a way the app can access, although that's probably impossible without their help.

chrischen• 12 years ago

Have they tried selling prints? We also provide a photo to painting API that can be monetization for photo apps like this.

PaulHoule2• 12 years ago

These guys saw my site

http://ookaboo.com/

years ago and tried to hire me but I was too hung up in a dead end job and my general confusion at the time. It's funny to me know that after this time I have the stronger hand!

I probably lose $300 a month running Ookaboo right now, and I can afford that, but my site could use some sprucing up and more photos.

Write me or call me at +1 (607) 539 6254 if you want to see this happen.

sixQuarks• 12 years ago

why does it cost you so much to run this site?

PaulHoule2• 12 years ago

It has 100GB+ of image files and handles pretty heavy traffic volume from web crawlers alone because it has something like 5 million pages covering 2 million or so data items. I need a hefty MySQL instance to back it because

(i) I need to have fast response time for the site to be usable (ii) The database is horribly bloated (maybe 80% of the table mass doesn't have to be there) (iii) The physical instance of the database isn't as optimized as it could be

An optimized system would cost a lot less to run. It's plausible that better monetization could make the site break even now, but if I could lower the cost per image by a 3x-10x factor I might be able to put more images in (there are another 50 million or so I can grab) and maybe drive up traffic but really I haven't done it because I've been pursuing other deals that have better expectation values.

Also from an ops perspective it is a wooden round, I only have to make an editorial change once a week and something goes wrong with it technologically less than once in six months. In theory I could delete a bunch of database columns and the system might keep cruising, but it might come crashing down and cost $1000's in billable time to make right.

tony_landis• 12 years ago

Does anyone have the owner's contact? If so please put me in touch at tonylandis-at-gmail, I am interested in purchasing.

ulfw2• 12 years ago

Real pity. I loved the beautiful photography the app provided. It made me want to travel more. Maybe they should have work with the travel industry to make bookings available. Oh well.

zkar• 12 years ago

Their domain name would itself be worth quite some amount.

pan69• 12 years ago

Would National Geographic not be interested in purchasing this and keep it alive? It would be a shame to see it disappear.

jpn• 12 years ago

Hi everyone!

We wrote up a little comparison of all the Fotopedia alternatives.

You can check it out here:

https://bonjourn.al/blog/17-fotopedia-alternatives-a-short-l...

Fotopedia is shutting down

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