Gfycat is shutting down September 1st
Gfycat | Watch and Create GIFs, Videos, Memes
The Gfycat service is being discontinued. Please save or delete your Gfycat content by visiting https://www.gfycat.com and logging in to your account. After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted from gfycat.com
I guess it's just impossible to make these types of large media storage sites profitable. The business model itself is inherently unprofitable despite there being a need for these sites. Like youtube will never bring a cent back to google, but they keep running it because it locks people into their ecosystem for data harvesting.
Could also be that snap bought gfycat just to kill it.
YouTube is very profitable now. MEGA is probably profitable.
Youtube is definitely bringing back a profit to Google. Probably not huge, but definitely far from 0% return.
Now they did have to shove way more ads in there to make it happen.
Having an acceptable ratio between ads and a big media storage seems pretty much impossible, unless subscription based which most people can't really afford.
They aren't profitable currently because of the race to the bottom are free sites funded by cheap venture capital are able to succeed drive out all the ones that actually have sustainable business models.
What's going to happen here in the very near future is the sites that charge you to upload, were you actually have to pay for your usage of the internet are going to pop up and then they will sustain themselves for longer periods of time.
Growth phase is over on the internet,
Could also be that snap bought gfycat just to kill it.
Wouldn't surprise me.
Why compete when it's cheaper to buy then shut down your competitors?
I'm not surprised. How can this be sustainable? Images are embedded in the websites with no way for Gfycat to make any revenue.
As far as I know, companies like Gfycat make money by selling API access to different apps. Like say in a messaging app likeTelegram or Signal. The easiest way for them to integrate a gif search and send function inside of messages is through API access to Gfycat's servers. Gfycat then charges them for this streamlined integration and access.
That plus selling user data or ads on their website means they will have some revenue. I dont know if its enough to keep them afloat. Since they are shutting down, I'm guessing it didnt pan out so well.
sounds like they should have asked u/spez for some advice on API pricing. /s
Wait, gfycat collects user data whenever I use one of their gifs? https://media.giphy.com/media/5eFp76zhsq3uw/giphy.gif
It sure as hell lasted a long time though
This past year in particular has really hammered it in for me that even if you can never truly delete something from the internet, it doesn't mean it'll still be there when you're looking for it. Saving a link to something is not saving it at all, and I'm starting to become a data hoarder.
Man, I really feel like the internet is under a major shake up at the moment. Feels weird.
edit: spelling
Unfortunately, big tech has been expending millions (edit: more like billions, maybe trillions) in currency and talent to figure out how to make all-you-can-eat video and images turn a profit. Apparently, it just can't happen at a global scale even when it's lousy with ads and personal data collection.
So, get ready to open your wallet. We'll probably see more and more such services moving to paid-for subscriptions. (IMO)
Which most people won't be able to afford. You can't have a gazillion subscription services running, it's just not going to happen. You can already see the VOD services self destruct over this. It started all with just Netflix, one site to rule them all. That was fine and a real alternative to pirated content like torrents & illegal streams. But now we have Amazon, and Disney, and an endless amount of other ones, all wanting their 15 bucks per month (which some consider too low) to offer you a couple exclusive titles, all spread out over the various suppliers. You'd have to be rich to afford that or go through the hassle of constantly switching service, at which point you might as well just shell out the 5 bucks for Mullvad and go back to piracy.
I used Gfycat (before uploads broke) all the time mainly for its silent autoplay in Discord to share gaming clips with my friends. Any alternatives? Or am I now just slapping my vids straight into Discord?
Not sure what would prevent you to do that, but you can post video in discord that plays inline.
https://catbox.moe runs on donations and shares the original file without recompressing.
Not sure what would prevent you to do that, but you can post video in discord that plays inline.
Wow that sucks
That's gonna result in a massive amount of dead links. The internet really is dying...
I don't think it's dying. I hope it's a paradigm shift like when it changed from wild west lawless chaos to three or four huge companies running all of it. Maybe we end up with everything replaced by different distributed services. It's going to incredibly annoying when half the search results are dead links or links to reddit but that annoyance can drive innovation.
I’m 100% down to go back to Wild West.
The feeling and freedom of playing runescape on the early 2000s unfiltered internet was something I’ve missed. Maybe it’s coming back.
The problem is, you won't get the sort of compatibility you enjoy now any more. So many different applications, phone keyboards etc support gfycat and that's where all the content is.
They won't support dozens of disparate led popular services spread across the internet.
Those services are also likely to be less reliable, less well moderated for offensive/illegal content and such, and more likely to randomly disappear.
Like why Reddit was such a success, I want stability. I want one, reliable, centralised place I can go for everything.
Another concern I have, considering Lemmy specifically, is hacking of their infrastructure. Is my Lemmy account data as secure as my Reddit account? No. The software isn't as secure, and the security teams are non existent, it's just a guy (a wonderful guy!) hosting this as a hobby.
And even if one server does get a proper tech security team, that's just one server.
There's also the question of WHO is hosting a Lemmy instance being used, are they trustworthy? Are they being independently audited? Have they been found in compliance with GDPR? Are they secretly selling our data? Could be, who knows.
For all the awful things that come with a big company like Reddit, there's more scrutiny, accountability, etc.
I don't mean to diss Lemmy, I'm really really hopeful for it. I just have a lot of early concerns, things they'll have to solve before I can really see it being the trustworthy, solid cornerstone of the internet I'd like it to be.
Search engines will just have to get better at scrubbing their databases. Most of this stuff is ephemeral so it's usually a deep search that leads to these old threads...and future dead links. Distributed services isn't bad, it's just different. Pre-web it was archie, gopher, veronica, usenet, etc. Now all those things - or their equivalent data - run on top of the web. It's just an evolution.
Three or four huge companies sounds terrible
We need to choose. Link rot or massive megacorps owning everything on the Internet.
Before reddit, imgur, etc got big, the Internet was FULL of dead links. Image links in particular. Small image hosts cleared their storage after a while because, y'know, kinda expensive to host a bunch of content for free.
But you know what? We ran everything. And discovery was hella different. Personal websites, bulletin boards... Clicking links from one place to end up at another, and then you find another link to another website... It was something different entirely. Of course, Digg, StumbleUpon and reddit all were originally just websites where you could share what you'd discovered and other people could comment on it, but reddit ended up becoming THE place to hang out, and then nobody bothered going to all these small websites anymore.
I see the fediverse as being something in-between. The content doesn't all belong to a massive corporation, but it's also still MORE centralized than the Internet of old. We all hang out in a shared, federated space, rather than having a bunch of different spaces. Communities aren't as insular, which is both good and bad - and I guess everyone has different preferences anyway. But while on a big network like the fediverse or reddit, you tend to feel like part of a very big community (unless you subscribe exclusively to tiny communities/subs), on the forums of old, you'd have a small community and most people were fairly active participants, so it really felt like a close-knit community if you know what I mean.
I hope that IPFS (or something like it) may end up improving that dichotomy
But the net is also different from back then. For one way more people use it and what is expected of it has changed. People expect to stream 1080p/4K video for free and that is not cheap.
I still remember the Photobucket apocalypse back in the day. One day to the next seemed like internet only had "broken link" images.
Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.
A long time.
Is this how a recession feels?
Honestly didn't expect it to be THIS kind of recession
It's going to be a world record speed run at this rate.
If this feels like struggling to feed yourself and your children, scraping to try to pay rent before you're evicted, desperate to find any job available and scared because you have no options and nowhere to turn, then yes, it feels like a recession.
I'm not sure if it's dying because this constantly happens. Practically all the image hosts I grew up died ages ago (and many of their replacements, too). Dead image links in older forums are more common than working links. I think it's very difficult to create a sustainable image and video host, especially when people want to use it mostly in embedded or direct links, which really limits the ability to monetize.
I think websites hosting their own images is often ideal because:
That said, the big downsides are inefficiency and tooling. Central hosts meant more efficient caching. Stuff like GIFs in particular are often common memes. I bet the 1000 most common memes are reused by thousands of sites worldwide and thus work great in a CDN (content delivery network -- basically a distributed cache for media files). As well, central sites can build embeddable widgets or stuff like GIF keyboards (e.g., the default Android keyboard, GBoard, has GIF support with I think GIPHY and Discord seems to use Tenor). If every site has to host their own, that's a lot of reinventing the wheel. Common libraries can help, but not to the extent that a managed cloud service can.
As an aside, I wonder if Google and Discord pay for that GIF integration into their products?
The current wave seems more severe due to centralization and coincidence.
Twitter, Reddit, Imgur, Gfycat and a bunch of others seem to all crash themselves practically over night - and the same night at that. And due to centralization/monopolies, that means a significant chunk of the respective niches are gone without a clear replacement. And especially reddit was a niche aggregator.
It's almost like a system that rewards short-term gains and maximizing profit for the few at the top at the expense of everything else is neither sustainable nor beneficial for the long-term health of the broader environment or community. 🤔
Ahh I'm sure that's not a big problem. Let's keep growing and growing everything! /s
I wonder if the internet, possibly the worlds best accomplishment in cooperation, can survive a post-globalist world?
Perhaps it’s the purist expression of the wave in optimism for liberalised trade before it crested and rolled back out to sea.
I think these services need to think about monetization from the beginning rather than the "make product, get users, ???, Profit".
Thankfully we won't need to find out, there's no evidence that we're in a post globalist world, or entering one any time soon.
The EU and friendly ties via NATO are a great example, nations are realising more than ever that they must come together and work together to survive, and the Internet continues to make the world smaller, our communities closer.
Not to mention the ever growing essential economic links between nations.
There's the occasional missteps of course, some xenophobes and fascists in various nations want to close their borders and essentially become North Korea, but that'll never happen, it would be far, far too damaging for those nations if they actually listened to that vocal minority.
I'm a bit surprised they lasted this long to he honest. How did they make money? Ads?
They make money by selling information about you.
My first thought was my NSFW reddit account... If they didn't already kill it with 3rd party apps, I'd be bummed...
Gfycat banned nsfw a while back. Now if redgifs shuts down...
Its about to look like a giant graveyard
Hopefully going back to its roots 🤞