CNET's AllYouCanUpload Is Disruptive
CNET very quietly launched a simple new photo uploading site called AllYouCanUpload last week. At first glance it doesn't appear to be very special or disruptive. But it is.
Via TechCrunch.com -- [ read more | digg story ]
Naysayers are asking, "What's the business model?"
For years now, email marketers and web sites have been using tracking bugs (small embedded images) to understand audience flow, and spending big bucks to do it.
If your business depends on staying on top of Internet trends as CNET's does, the data from a service like this is more valuable than the infinitesimal costs for storage and bandwidth consumed by JPEGs.
A nice web gallery size image is less than 500K. Storage and bandwidth these days is often under $0.50 per gigabyte. Amazon's S3 charges about 20 cents per gigabyte. That's $0.0001 per image. For CNET to know what sites 100 people have visited, only costs them a penny with web gallery images.
They don't just get data about the web sites visited where people posted photos, they also get tracking information about the audience visiting those sites. Since forum images are typically under 50K, CNET can probably learn about 1000 sites and 1000 visitors at that price.
It's well worth it.