
Fotopedia is shutting down - uptown
http://blog.fotopedia.com/fotopedia-shutdown/
======
arb99
Never heard of it before, but its homepage -
[http://www.fotopedia.com/reporter/magazine](http://www.fotopedia.com/reporter/magazine)
has lots of great pics.

And
[http://www.fotopedia.com/reporter/stories/CxVE4flM6pA](http://www.fotopedia.com/reporter/stories/CxVE4flM6pA)
is pretty good

~~~
jonnym1ller
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](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!

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

~~~
toomuchtodo
Already talking to Jason/ArchiveTeam about it.

~~~
sp332
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?

~~~
toomuchtodo
The latter. I've already reached out on Twitter, but you know, contingency
plans.

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PaulHoule
These guys saw my site

[http://ookaboo.com/](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
why does it cost you so much to run this site?

~~~
PaulHoule
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.

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

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sp332
Wow - only 10 days notice!

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

~~~
sp332
Yeah, but this is not their data, it belongs to their users. It would have
been better to communicate before now.

~~~
classicsnoot
Better is relative. They could have just iced the site and killed their email,
which i hear is not a rare course to take.

How many days notice equates to appropriate when killing the hopes and dreams
of an0n users?

~~~
sp332
How about a month? How about making sure that users can log in and download
their own data whenever they want, even if the rest of the site doesn't work?
How about uploading public posts to the Internet Archive?

~~~
classicsnoot
Sounds ok, but think about the pain of that for the creators? not to mention
continuing costs. I do not think there is a perfect answer, but maybe the
'community' should come up with a largely agreed upon time and call it
something descriptive and recognizable...

~~~
sp332
Neither of those things sounded that painful to me. I just mean you don't have
to maintain the full site functionality (and associated cost), because the
goal is just to make the data available.

~~~
classicsnoot
If i had a site, and i knew people loved it, just not enough, then killing it
would bring me pain. but that is emotional and subjective.

~~~
sp332
Oh sure, but imagine how all the people providing their content to your site
would feel about you deleting their content!

~~~
classicsnoot
Indeed. So there has to be a way to fairly and logically kill something
someone presumably loves whilst also making sure original content is
protected.

Let's get on this everyone has some spare time.

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hyperliner
What was the original intended business model of Fotopedia?

~~~
anon1385
>What was the original intended business model of Fotopedia?

Get bought by Google, Facebook or Yahoo.

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

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dewey
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](http://www.fotopedia.com/reporter/map)

[1] [https://exposure.co/](https://exposure.co/)

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tommyd
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.

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superasn
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)

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jpn
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...](https://bonjourn.al/blog/17-fotopedia-alternatives-a-short-list)

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reinier_s4g
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.

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ulfw
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.

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pan69
Would National Geographic not be interested in purchasing this and keep it
alive? It would be a shame to see it disappear.

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

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zkar
Their domain name would itself be worth quite some amount.

