Zippyshare Quits After 17 Years, 45 Million Visits Per Month Makes No Money (torrentfreak.com) 81
After almost 17 years online, file-hosting veteran Zippyshare will shut down at the end of the month. TorrentFreak: Founded in 2006, Zippyshare was known for its free, no-nonsense, no-frills approach to storing files online. Having changed very little over the years, Zippyshare's operators say the platform is now a dinosaur that costs too much to run in a world where ad-blocking is widespread. Zippyshare said, "Since 2006 we have been on the market in an unchanged form, that is, as ad financed/free file hosting. However, you have been visiting in less and less over the years, as the arguably very simple formula of the services we offer is slowly running out of steam. I guess all the competing file storage service companies on the market look better, offer better performance and more features. No one needs a dinosaur like us anymore."
penny transactions (Score:3)
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Problem is volatility -- it's nearly impossible to value bitcoin, and the transaction fees are ridiculous.
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I appreciate that -- I never bought in
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lol missed the GP -- disregard my message
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I still don't see an easy mechanism for making penny transactions
Sounds like a use case for cryptocurrency. Bitcoin on Lightning would fit the bill nicely.
That was arguably Nakamoto's main goal. Sadly, their proposal ended up as a vehicle for speculation, money laundering, cyber-extortion, and Ponzi schemes.
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Most people don't send or receive BTC at all. It sits on exchanges or in private wallets the majority of the time. And some of the exchanges still don't use LN which is where it would matter.
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Yes. Who designs something they actually want to be used/circulated as deflationary?
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> I still don't see an easy mechanism for making penny transactions
Brave kinda has something like this but nearly all the browsers block mining scripts, even if you were to give them permission. The payment model is electricity via CPU for service there.
No shocker that Google, an ad company, led the way and everybody followed like sheep.
Well ... DUH! (Score:5, Insightful)
.... The problem is that even when users get a free service, they continue to block ads.
And that's because 99.999% of the ads are scams and garbage that nobody would ever click on except by accident.
Re:Well ... DUH! (Score:5, Insightful)
I use an ad-blocker because the web is basically unusable without one. I want sites I use to get ad revenue. I read the ads, and I click on ones that interest me in hopes that my lack of tracker blocking will help them deliver more relevant ads. But it just doesn't work. It's like they think we'll buy their product if they make us hate them enough.
Re:Well ... DUH! (Score:5, Insightful)
I normally run an adblocker with "acceptable ads" allowed. But occasionally I test webpages without it.
Recent list of horrible ads for me:
Animated ads - on an otherwise static webpage. With no end of animation in sight. In distracting colors, and flashing fit to give somebody a seizure.
Ads that pop up in the middle of content, covering it.
Ads with sound, in addition to being animated.
Maybe not a paid ad, but news sites thinking I need to see an announcer reading off the article I'm reading, while covering the text in a floating window.
Ads with lying "x to close" buttons. Which treat trying to close the ad as the same as clicking on it.
Autoforward of the whole damn page to the advertisement site.
Ads that treat clicking on the site's search bar as clicking on the ad
Porn ads showing full penetration on non-porn website/page. Worse: It was fatties!
Sure, website, you want me to support you by not blocking ads. How about you make it so your site works with the ads shown? This is up there with the games where the cracked, pirated version of the game ran faster and more stable than the official version!
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Maybe not a paid ad, but news sites thinking I need to see an announcer reading off the article I'm reading, while covering the text in a floating window.
I'm glad I'm not the only one left that doesn't want my news read to me like I'm a toddler. As for the rest of it, pretty much spot on. Their abusive ad practices that necessitated ad-blockers in the first place are their own doing, and they've proven that they don't even want us to forgive them.
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Ads are basically dead for the web. There is no way to salvage them now. Even if some sites do display ethical ads, the number of people who don't block them will be small. Ethical ads also mean no tracking, and ad vendors getting suspicious because they can't verify views and clicks.
Affiliate links can work.
Donations could work if they were easier to make. I'd stick a few bucks in some kind of crypto based system where the browser collects tokens and then later anonymously turns them into payments to indiv
Re:Well ... DUH! (Score:5, Insightful)
I want sites I use to get ad revenue. I read the ads
well, i surely don't.
- "but, but ... without ads you would have no internet!!!"
turns out i'm old enough to know what the internet was like before ads infected everything and, oh yes, bring that back any day if you can! i'm afraid there's no turning back, though, so ad-blockers it is all the way, baby.
i'm anyway not in any "ad" demographic. you will never get a cent off me via ads. via references or search engines? maybe. but pestering me with "click-on" ads? or holograms, for that matter. if that actually works it just shows how primitive our civilization still is for a sizeable portion of people being willing to indulge in purchase decisions simply on response to random suggestions from a stranger. that's just sick, with a zombie vibe. makes u think if the short money for education is really well spent, or maybe it's just working as intended?
that you admit to actually reading those ads and proactively clicking just for the sake of supporting the rotten business behind them is truly remarkable. my mind just exploded a bit. keep it up! :-)
Want to go back to dial-up? (Score:2)
turns out i'm old enough to know what the internet was like before ads infected everything
I am old enough to remember such an Internet as well. Connection speeds were in the hundredths of a megabit per second because home Internet was dial-up. If all ad-supported websites (including Slashdot) were to vanish from the web overnight, I doubt the major residential fiber and cable Internet service providers (ISPs) would retain enough subscribers over the next few months to stay in business.
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The internet, for you and myself, remember from the early days was mostly built for and by techies. "make me a website" costs exploded due to several things:
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avg speed today are in the hundredths of megabit per second (u probably meant megabytes). and your prophecy just doesn't make sense. people paid for access then, there is no reason to think they wouldn't still pay now, except massification and optimization have driven the costs down and improved performance considerably. that "thing" that you imply wouldn't work actually thrived. it just was colonized by bad practices.
the whole ad ecosystem based on click-counts, impacts and viewing time is just a gigantic
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avg speed today are in the hundredths of megabit per second (u probably meant megabytes).
"Hundreds of Mbps" means 100-999 Mbps.
"Hundredths of Mbps" with a "th" means 0.01-0.09 Mbps, that is, 10-99 kbps. Dial-up was usually 14.4 kbps, 31.2 kbps (on nominally 33.6K modems), or 50 kbps (on nominally 56K modems), depending on line quality.
people paid for access then
People paid for dial-up in the pre-advertising era of the Internet because subscribers deemed the text and small images that could be produced by a hobbyist to be adequate. Nowadays, most people tend to expect larger images and video that tend to require more than
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lol, my bad, sorry for the confusion.
still doesn't change the argument. tech evolves, gets cheaper, allows more content, makes it easier to share and access, but the content doesn't have to be ads, nor does the system need ads to function and grow.
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I got 14.4k on the early internet. Though I had a 19.2k modem, my ISP at the time only supported 14.4k and 28.8k. I did later upgrade to 56k.
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i'm old enough to know what the internet was like before ads infected everything and, oh yes, bring that back any day if you can!
Ads are a negative to the internet in every way. Not only are they annoying, but they inspire people to make click-bait, along with outright lies.
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that you admit to actually reading those ads and proactively clicking just for the sake of supporting the rotten business behind them is truly remarkable. my mind just exploded a bit. keep it up! :-)
Even worse, I sometimes actually click the link on YouTube video ads so the creator can get the extra $0.00000001 revenue.
Do your part. If we all hate advertisers then make them pay up and support something you like.
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Maybe ad blockers could "stealth" click on ads and launch the results invisibly in a safe/secure manor so the site thinks they were viewed and clicked but the actual "customer" doesn't have to see or do anything.
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It's fraud to programmatically download ads and not view them?
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I use an ad-blocker because the web is basically unusable without one. I want sites I use to get ad revenue. I read the ads, and I click on ones that interest me in hopes that my lack of tracker blocking will help them deliver more relevant ads. But it just doesn't work. It's like they think we'll buy their product if they make us hate them enough.
https://adnauseam.io/ [adnauseam.io]
Click all the ads, poison the profile well, support the web host.
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Then there is the issue of malvertising. It isn't as huge as it used to be when third party add-ons allowed code to run as a user context, unfettered (Chrome did well in putting code in a restricted space, and Firefox soon followed), but ads are still a major vector for malware.
Of course, there are the issues of slow connections, metered stuff, and all that. There are many people who can't afford to have full 8k videos of clickbait scammy garbage thrown at them.
But, hell with ads, because of the sheer abu
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The real reason is piracy (Score:2)
Maybe don't host malware ads (Score:5, Insightful)
I allowlist a lot of my favorite websites that make revenue from advertising as long as the ads are relatively unobtrusive and decently controlled. Zippyshare was one of the many filesharing sites that covered 80% of the screen with ads, pushed questionable downloads, and did things like make multiple Download buttons which downloaded crapware with the real download being a small thing somewhere else.
If your source of revenue is tricking people into infecting their computer with shit, I have no sympathy for when it dries up when people take precautions.
No surprise (Score:2)
Re:No surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
It is not the ads I hate, but how intrusive the ads are these days on the WEB. No wonder ad-blockers are so popular.
In the days before the WEB, newspapers and magazines had ads, but they were such people could ignore them. Plus easy enough for people to look for them. I knew a few who liked the ads in the "old" media and would go through them.
TV was the same a long time ago, but since ads on various TV networks have become far more intrusive, no wonder people are moving to streaming. But be warned, cable started out as "no ads", you can see where that is now.
At least with WEB based media, one can block ads. Maybe these marketers will wake up and realize a change is needed in presentation.
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In the days before the WEB, newspapers and magazines had ads, but they were such people could ignore them.
Ignore them is a bit much. They are ads. They are eye catching by design. But at least these were static. And didn't track you. And at least had someone go over it to make sure it fit with the paper.
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At least with WEB based media, one can block ads.
You can can certainly try, but almost every major news site has anti-adblock scripts now. It's annoying.
Script-dependent websites (Score:2)
I have tried using a script blocker extension for Firefox [mozilla.org] on several websites. What has often end up happening on sites like Fortune and Quora is that the site displays a throbber in the middle of the screen that a script replaces with the page's content. "Inspect Element" shows that the text of article pages on sites like these is either in a data island (which the page's script translates to a DOM) or fetched in a second request after the page load. Even some news sites that displayed more than a throbber
Re: No surprise (Score:1)
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You can can certainly try, but almost every major news site has anti-adblock scripts now. It's annoying.
For which there is https://12ft.io/ [12ft.io] and "Bypass Paywalls Clean".
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You might also try hitting up your favorite news site's RSS feed instead. Even if the feed only has a summary, there are scripts that will pull the full text of the article and inject that into the feed that your reader shows. I do this with a news site [reviewjournal.com] that has gotten more aggressive with its paywall and anti-adblock measures recently; full news articles are still coming through that I can browse with a feed reader.
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> almost every major news site has anti-adblock scripts now
Then they aren't worth using.
And nothing of value was lost. /s
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In a few cases, the ads were pretty much the whole point of the publication. Computer Shopper was one such example. I built my first x86 box in the early '90s by scouring the ads in Computer Shopper for parts and following some books and a videotape that showed how everything wen
Duh! Paid tier? (Score:2)
Seriously, I don't use sites that make money via ads. They are way too invasive, way too many, and are still way too dangerous as attack/infection vectors.
I will happily pay for a service where I can dump the ads.
I think you (Zippy) would have found quite a few people that would have paid for your services but wouldn't touch them as free, ad-based services.
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Not defending Zippy at all, just laughing that you are posting on a site that is funded by ads.
I'd gladly pay a subscription for /. if they would let me get rid of the ads.
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Not defending Zippy at all, just laughing that you are posting on a site that is funded by ads.
LOL Wut? I can't even remember the last time I saw an ad here, thanks to ad blocking.
I'd gladly pay a subscription for /. if they would let me get rid of the ads.
So would most people. Except that's not how it works. There are LOTS of websites that charge a subscription fee and STILL have ads. It's called greed. No amount of money is ever enough.
Most people don't block ads just because they are trying to be a jerk. They do it because websites refuse to be reasonable about it.
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My ad blocker works on Slashdot. If they offered a paid tier, I'd be on that too.
The issue is that Slashdot isn't threatening to shut down due to ad blockers and lost income. If they did threaten it, I would have replied to them in the same light - just launch a paid tier.
And honestly I'm surprised they can keep this site alive. We're all geeks here, we're all running ad blockers and noscript and all kinds of other things that would prevent their capitalizing on the site.
They should develop a paid tier, I'm
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Why? Slashdot users can opt out (sorta).
Disable Advertising [X]
As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable advertising.
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No, you have enough karma to be posting at +2 like me. You're not "net neutral".
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Once other Slashdot users have applied a net sum of 25 positive moderations to your comments, your account has "Excellent" karma.
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But the ads on Slashdot are generally not intrusive, so I just leave the ads on in this site. Sites with ads that overlay the content, autoplay video and audio, or other obnoxious behavior, I generally just leave. Ads blocked or not, I don't really need to be on those sites.
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My Slashdot has a check box that lets me disable ads.
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Respectfully,
Already posted and commented: by srg33 ( 1095679 ) on Monday March 20, 2023 @02:47PM (#63385573), etc.
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Good for you.
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Slashdot used to have a subscription tier which removed ads.
The fact that they no longer have it is telling.
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Slashdot used to have a subscription tier which removed ads.
Yep, and it was never explained why it was removed. The subscription FAQ page [slashdot.org] about it is still available, as is the (non-functional) sign-up page [slashdot.org]. Slashdot's system was based on pageviews, not calendar time, which is nice. I would have signed up a long time ago. I block ads without remorse, but I do try to pay for a site when I value it highly and the price is reasonable.
I occasionally still see users with the subscription star next to their name on posts, presumably because they had an active sub when
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I think you (Zippy) would have found quite a few people that would have paid for your services but wouldn't touch them as free, ad-based services.
Most of these types of file hosting sites (which have others have mentioned, are usually used for piracy) have a subscription model which expects the downloaders to be the ones to foot the bill. People who are trying to get something for free really aren't the most profitable demographic.
Never Heard Of Them (Score:2)
I wouldn't trust a free file hosting site anyway, much less a paid one. I buy hard drives and store my own stuff locally. Has worked fine for 30+ years.
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OK. One gramps to another ... this article isn't about file STORAGE as in Gdrive, iCloud, and the like. It's about sharing copywritten files. :)
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Ohh. That's what I get for not reading the article.
I wouldn't know about copywritten files. I believe in free speech, hence all things written are free.
I guess ftp sites and those new fangled torrent sites have put the kibbosh on said Zippyshare then.
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After 17 years (Score:2)
Still not having fun yet. [zippythepinhead.com]
Sorry, Zippy.
This could be a poster child for cryptocurrency... (Score:1)
This is one of the few things where cryptocurrency, of all things, would be quite useful. Maybe this is something the Lightning Network with BTC could be used with, but also currencies like Monero or some lightweight altcoin would be good as well.
Pay the website some amount to store a certain sized file for a time period. After that time period expires, if the time isn't renewed, the file is then deleted.
As for how to upload/download files, this is easy. Upload a file, and anyone who wants to download it
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That's roughly what FileCoin does.
IPFS ought to be about as good for most people. file.pizza is not bad for what it is.
You brought this on yourself (Score:4, Informative)
Dear ad-supported industry,
Go die already. Crash, burn and die. You have done everything you could to deserve that fate. Let's take a trip down memory lane, shall we?
Let's go back a quarter century to when the WWW was young, most pages were unencrypted and you could (and did) surf without adblockers. You had your Geocities homepage that was part of some Webring (that broke almost as soon as you created it) and AOL was not just a crappy search engine but actually a, if not the, ISP. You used dialup to connect to the internet, downloaded with a lightning 56kbit/sec (if you were fancy and didn't live in a back-ass country like mine where even using that 33.6 modem could land you in hot water because the telco thought you're melting their cables). And if you don't know what any of this means, let's just say it was a better time.
And yes, there were ads. A webpage had a little banner somewhere at the top. It was like one by four inches large (which was a lot considering the average monitor back then had 14 of those inches as a diagonal). You accepted that because, hey, it didn't bother you too much. But that was also the problem, you were not bothered enough by it. So it started flashing. And then it started spinning and moving around on the page. Then it started to scroll along with you as you moved down over the page. Next thing it popped up in a new window when you visited that page and you first of all had to close that window so you could actually see what you wanted to see. And then its friends came along and moving between pages became a marathon of window-closing.
Then ads started to actually contain malware. And I don't mean "click here for infection", I mean, that the malware was delivered along with the ad. Thanks to IE and early asp which had security holes you could move whole solar systems through, mostly, but that was by far not the only way to get infected. Especially later as Adobe brought along the number one infector that held that spot for a long, long time, and that was also a darling of the ad industry: Flash player.
And this is maybe 5 minutes of the story of advertising on the net, and also the tamer and less horrid 5 minutes. I'll spare you the rest, lest you install a blocker for my stories here.
The net effect was that everyone, and I mean everyone, started to install adblockers. Yes, even people who had no clue about the net. That we, the "computer-savvy" people who know how to get around shit we don't like, did it was a given. But that crap became SO annoying that even Joe Randomsurfer started to search for ways to get rid of that shit. To give you an idea just HOW annoying this was. You know that friend whose computer is so cluttered with freeware, adware, nagware and other shit that starting the computer first requires closing 20 popups telling him to register this or configure that? The people who have a billion icons on their desktops because they install EVERYTHING, have no idea how to uninstall anything and their solution to software bloat is to buy a new drive? THESE people, who neither knew anything about their computers nor had any interest in learning anything about them, THESE people had adblockers installed.
And now of course the ad industry is dying because they just couldn't stop when they should have. They were too used to how it worked on TV where the consumer couldn't do anything but to grin and bear it when they pissed him off with more and more annoying, in-your-face and outright obnoxious ads.
Their problem: The user could do something against that pest on a computer.
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Amen, brother.
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Oh yeah I remember that time. An internet devoid of content that wasn't gifted by some hobby geek who wanted to share something with the world. An internet where you were much better off going to ask a librarian how the Dewey Decimal Classification works so you can learn something from a book rather than an internet awash with how to guides on literally every topic on the planet.
Look I get it. No one likes ads, but the reality is the borderline no-ads experience of the 90s works when there's borderline no c
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It was also naive of the industry to think people would put up with it if they can avoid it. If you get on my nerves, I will show you the door. And that's exactly what happened here.
Offer a cheap alternative to ads (Score:2)
I think this also applies to the ad-blocking problem.
I, for one, don't block ads. But I would love to have an option of "continue, for free, with ads OR pay $0.10 for this download with one click". I.e. microstransactions.
There is/was this company where you could say "I want to pay 10$ per month.". Then, those 10$ would get split between participating websites that you use in that month.
Thing
Multi-publisher subscription bundles (Score:2)
There is/was this company where you could say "I want to pay 10$ per month.". Then, those 10$ would get split between participating websites that you use in that month.
For others reading this thread, here are examples of multi-publisher subscription bundle platforms that you may have heard of.
One platform in operation at the turn of the millennium was Adult Check [wikipedia.org]: because grown-ups can pay for nice things. One major cause of Adult Check's demise is that too many participating publishers relied on exhibiting infringing copies of photographs from a magazine called Perfect 10.
Another was Webpass.io, which fizzled out circa 2016 according to its Facebook Page.
One still runnin
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But I would love to have an option of "continue, for free, with ads OR pay $0.10 for this download with one click". I.e. microstransactions.
No you wouldn't. Sure you claim you would, but the reality is that if you take that $0.10 and multiply it across all the content you actually consume you'd very quickly balk at the cost and massively scale back how you consume content. Everyone is happy paying for something when they think only in isolation.
Corrected: Zippyshare failed to monetize traffic (Score:1)
If you have that much traffic and can't monetize, then hire business adults.
Never heard of you (Score:2)
Congrats, ZippyShare, on your marketing. Great job! You made sure everyone who could use your service knew about you - NOT.