It's important to remember that the business model of file locker sites like RapidShare and Mega is to convince you to upload your files to their site so that they can monetize access to them. Your access as the original uploader is no exception - if they think they can squeeze a couple dollars/euros/bitcoins out of you through changes like this, they'll do it. If you don't want your files to be held hostage, you should probably consider hosting that has a different business model.
All the free users are screaming about how this destroys RapidShare's reputation and how they'll never use RapidShare again. Here's the thing, though. RapidShare used to care about free users when lots of folks were using it to host illegal files since it would encourage people to pay for faster downloads. As RapidShare is focused more on legitimate files, they don't care about these free users since the free users cost RapidShare money. Even if only 1% were to pay, RapidShare will make far more money off 100,000 paying users than they will off 10,000,000 free ones.
I created a full-text-search bookmarking app called historious (http://historio.us). It started out as free for everyone, since I just built it for myself and people found it useful, but I quickly had to charge, after realizing that people had more than my 10-20 bookmarks (some people had 80 THOUSAND).
I changed it to 2,000 free bookmarks, and unlimited paid, which worked well. Then I changed it to 300 free, then to 50 free. The reason why I did this is this:
As per my analytics package, on average, it takes less than two minutes for 95% of my users to upgrade to paid. Basically, from what I can see, users register, try it out with one or two bookmarks, then upgrade immediately if they like it. If they don't upgrade then, they are not very likely to ever upgrade.
Thus, it doesn't make sense for me to support free users (this is very expensive, since it stores the entire page for everything you bookmark, twice), so the free tier is more of a "trial" tier now.
I'm not sure how many people who would have upgraded if they'd tried it saw the limit and said "I won't use this, the free limit is too low", but, based on the data (and it sounds reasonable to me as well), they are not many. People reasonably want a short trial run, and then they either upgrade or don't.
Thanks for providing an interesting data point. I had a few questions I was wondering if you might be able to answer ?
1. How did you deal with existing free users already exceeding your new limits ? (and how did they react) ?
2. Did you see a measurable increase in upgrades after doing this ?
3. Did you see a measurable decrease in free users of the service after doing this ?
1. I store the limit as a field on each user's profile, so you get to keep the limit you signed up with (grandfathering). Users don't mind (obviously), and if I ever increase the limits, I just increase them for everyone. Storage is expensive, but it's not that expensive that I need to retroactively reduce old users' limits.
I have also needed to cull unused accounts (of free users who haven't logged in in months). This provided a great boost to the service (saved me from needing to keep upgrading the server for the past few months), but it has also produced a few false positives of people who hadn't used their accounts for a few months and came back. Luckily, I keep backups they can just restore.
2. The last limit change was a few days ago, so I haven't had a chance to gather significant data on this. I guess we'll know in a few months.
3. I will also track this, that is a good question. I anticipate that a few users will be deterred from using the service for free, but that might not necessarily be bad (I am not sure).
Do you mind sharing the average and standard deviation for the number of bookmarks? I know this sample is not representative of the general public but I'm still curious.
And while this is largely self evident to most people here, if you're looking for a deeper theoretical underpinning as to why this is the case, feel free to use this:
... it seems we have occasion to repost this about once a week these days.
And since we're sharing anecdotes, let me tell you what we just did yesterday:
We sent out an email to every customer we have that is both 500+ days in arrears with billing and 200+ days idle with usage, and asked them, please, for the love of god, get in touch with us and let us know whether to close their account or input an up to date credit card or whatever.
We feel so strongly about our duty to safeguard data for our customers that even if they haven't paid a dime for 500+ days, and by many measures have clearly abandoned their account, we still keep them fully live, just in case.
The OP shows us what happens when your business model is a clownshow (freemium, ad supported, whatever) and our mailing yesterday shows what happens when you charge real money for real service.
They should leave existing users data, if they wanted to keep any respect in the community I'd say. It is sad watching all these companies giving "free" services away, just to remove them again.
Don't trust anything free, because nothing really is.
Paying them yourself isn't enough when it comes to file lockers. Their goal is to get not only the original uploaders paying to keep their files online, but also some percentage of downloaders as well. That's why sites like this have countdown timers, bandwidth limits and waiting periods. They're hoping that people will get so sick of the bullshit trying to download your files that they'll spring for a premium subscription.
This is why they've had such an interesting relationship with copyright infringement. Obviously, they want to avoid getting shut down - but people uploading TV shows, games, music, movies, etc on places like DDL forums drive so much traffic and so many premium memberships that their business model almost depends on them.
Some of them even pay dividends to the popular uploaders, as a thank you for driving traffic. This drives an entire underground economy, where people upload copyrighted content to file lockers, then use the payments from the file locker service to buy more content to upload.
Edit: One example of this kind of underground economy is in the anime fansubbing community. You've got people who want to widely distribute 200-500mb files (generally) that are... not entirely free of copyright, to say the least. Hosting the files yourself would be a pain, as you'd get takedown notices AND have to pay for servers and bandwidth. However, you can upload your episodes to a couple file locker services and post the links on your site. You'll get a kickback from the file lockers for driving traffic, and if they get taken down, you can just reupload them, possibly even at the same site. The fansub groups say they use the money to pay for hosting and buy Blu-rays to rip and release, but I'm sure some of them pocket some as a salary too.
Most fansub groups stop when the content owners licence the product in the US or simply request that they do so. As to making money that's theoretically possible, but only in the spending all day helping a friend move for a beer is 'making money'.
I think your knowledge might be a little outdated. Now that streaming (and less frequently, retail) rights are being sold before the shows even air, there's very little mid-season dropping due to licensing - the groups that sub airing shows know that they're licensed, and they don't care. DVD/BD rip groups care even less, and they seem to use file lockers a lot more regularly than the actual fansubbers.
As far as profitability, I don't think that most of them are raking in the millions, or even doing it as a full-time job. Most of the profit is on the file locker's side - otherwise they wouldn't be giving payouts in the first place. I suspect that the groups that really push the DDLs probably make enough to pay for hosting and some percentage of the DVDs/BDs they buy. Whether you view that as profit is up to you - but I think it's a little more than getting a beer for helping a friend move.
I have not looked into fan-subs in a few years so you could be right. However, I have not seen a significant increase in the amount of anime translated so are you talking about 'rights' or the 'option' to buy said rights. Because, it seems odd if companies are paying significant amounts of money for distribution rights just to sit on it.
PS: Though if there is some great streaming service for anime I don't know about feel free to fill me in on that one.
Crunchyroll[1] is the big name in streaming nowadays, and they simulcast a substantial portion of each season. Funimation licenses for retail, simulcast and library streaming, and I believe they do their streaming via Hulu. Anime on Demand is a newer player, and Neon Alley is a PS3-exclusive (for now) service run by Viz that airs dubs on a schedule like a TV station. Some of the older players (Sentai Filmworks does a lot of this) will split a license with Crunchyroll, so one has retail and the other streaming. I'd say that the English-language market has generally switched to streaming, and that DVDs and BDs are almost an afterthought now.
Edit: Almost forgot, a bunch of the Japanese studios just announced their own English-subbed streaming service named Daisuki[2], but it won't launch until April. Will be interesting to see what impact that has on the foreign companies.
Out of curiosity, do you have a way of making money off your minecraft server (even if it's just enough to pay for bandwidth)? If not, then that saying still holds for commercial giveaways. Therefore it can probably be supplemented with "(community projects excepted)".
Donations, actually. It still operates at a net loss, but the costs are offset.
But to make it a bit more relevant, where would you put Canonical on this list? Ubuntu is given away for free, they don't sell their users (with the very arguable exception of the Amazon lens fiasco), yet they make their money by selling professional services (Landscape and the like).
I would still place that as a community project (or community service project), which is used as a loss leader for their commercial (support) offering. And, according to recent controversy surrounding their desktop search, some would argue that they are moving to their users being the product.
I had been a long-time premium user of Rapidshare through it's peak in 2007 to 2009 or so. Their service was wonderful (or so it seemed) until almost nobody used it anymore. The business model that Rapidshare held on to is clearly failing them as more and more users are switching to other sites that are either free or not that expensive (Mega, Mediafire, etc.)
Mediafire seems to be hitting the tubes, though. They used to be one of the best no-nonsense upload service (reliable, instant download, very rare CAPTCHAs, multiple concurrent downloads, no timeouts), but they've gotten much more aggressive about deleting files and putting in quite intrusive advertising-based CAPTCHAs - which broke bulk downloading tools like jDownloader, as I learned when I went to download a few hundred albums uploaded from Comiket 83 (I wanted to listen to them but also use them for a side-project on Touhou music statistics I've been working on).
However, if free users want to “add storage space” – i.e give RapidShare some money – they can keep their files.
For 9.99 euros for 30 days (or 99.99 euros per year), users can have 250GB of storage space. The 500GB storage account costs 19.99 euros per 30 days or 199.99 per year.
So what happens when users want to store more than 500GB? TorrentFreak was told that a user asked RapidShare how much it would cost to host around 2TB of files and was given a price of 120 euros ($155) per month. For less money anyone can buy a real-life hard drive, not just once but every single month.
So, it looks like they might also delete data from paying users, with only 24 hours notice.
2TB for $155/month? S3 would be $175/month, or $140/month at reduced redundancy. What a shock that you might pay market rates for online storage services.
I don't understand why people are willing to pay hundreds or a few thousands on a good computer and then expect everything on the internet to be free. I think people need to be more prepared to pay for good services. (Not commenting on the quality of the service in question, I haven't used it in a long time)
I, for one, shy away from paying for subscription content online because even some of the best merchants have proven time and time again that they are unable to properly secure my data. People paid money to Sony. People paid money to Dropbox. People paid money to LastPass. People paid money to Linode. And these companies have all let their customers down in security. Why should I believe RapidShare etc would be any better?
www.symform.com gives you UNLIMITED cloud storage. The catch? you get a certain amount free but for more space you have to share your hard drive space. I use it for data redundancy and it works fuckin great =)
