SubscribeFacebook: Storing all those photos isn’t cheap!
Published by cornelius on Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 in Entrepreneurship, Technology.Tags: multimedia, Technology, user-generated content
The expanding user base comes with growing costs—in the form of higher expenses for computer servers, storage, electricity, and Internet bandwidth.
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Tech analysts believe Facebook’s breathtaking growth is raising its technology costs sharply.
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Facebook spends heavily on equipment such as storage technology. The company is now the world’s largest photo-sharing site. Last October, when it had 100 million users, the company said it had uploaded more than 10 billion photos to the site. Facebook’s storage costs are multiples of what an average company spends because it stores four images of each photo its users put onto their Facebook pages. To handle all that data, Facebook needs to buy dozens of storage systems every year.
[Source: BusinessWeek - Facebook Is Hunting for More Money]
Why do I blog this?
The goal of Facebook becoming the web operating system with photo and video sharing services out-of-the-box comes with a high price point. It’s obvious that they have to find a better way to monetize their services if every day most of their users upload large amounts of multimedia data and all their buddies are accessing it. Flickr, YouTube and most of the large sites that offer user-generated multimedia content uploading and sharing should face similar problems. Is it a good way to think about the costs of one feature, e.g. 4 sizes of a picture vs. only one or 1Gb video upload vs. 100Mb, beforehand? Tough question and the quality of your service is the most important criterion.
With Tagcrumbs we are happy to not yet support photo uploads because there are more important features on our roadmap. For now we integrate Panoramio’s photo data, at least Google has some nice profits to keep this free service running.
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June 4th, 2009 at 6:13 am
[...] to see the dimension of the problems they have to face, storing billions of photos is not easy and cheap… It’s all about [...]