MySpace’ers learn harsh reality
When you host your stuff on a Web site that’s free and that you don’t control some nasty crap can happen. Yesterday MySpace started blocking Photobucket stuff.
My blog is hosted on WordPress.com and I have the same issues the MySpace folks are seeing (the free service where my blog is hosted right now, which is different from the software that you host on your own servers).
The thing is when a company is hosting your stuff for free they need to see some way to make money off of the service. This isn’t going to be free with no ads forever and ever. And, it certainly would piss me off if I worked on WordPress.com if someone came along and made money from my user’s photos and videos.
If you want to avoid these issues there’s really one choice: pay for your site’s own hosting and build your own traffic. One reason to join services like MySpace and WordPress.com is that there’s a built-in level of traffic — the home page on WordPress.com regularly drives hundreds, if not thousands of visitors to even new sites every day. If you go off and build your own site you don’t have those advantages, but you’ve got to live with when they pull down parasitic services, which is what Photobucket is.
This will chill investment in parasitic services for MySpace, though.
What do you think?
Oh, and I’m very happy with the deal I’m getting here at WordPress.com. Yeah, I can’t run every gadget, or do advertising, and there are some other limitations, but overall the service is really great.
Powered By 
April 11th, 2007 at 3:01 am
If you did need to leave wordpress.com, are you able to export your data? If so, it would be relatively easy to host it yourself since the WordPress code is freely available.
April 11th, 2007 at 4:11 am
Considering that non-marginal population reading you with RSS, what differences would it make if you hosted crazy stuff on your web pages?
April 11th, 2007 at 4:23 am
I’ll tell you what I think, I think you’re a goose. News Corp’s Myspace has become popular off the back of allowing broad creative freedom to users, and now it’s trying to take that away. Have you actually checked Myspace to see if there’s an easy alternative there to Photobucket’s video hosting? THERE ISN’T. People are using services such as this because MySpace DOESN’T offer an reasonable alternative + they want to run this stuff on their sites. This is literally a case of MySpace bitting the hand that has helped fuel its amazing success, it’s not an argument about whether they should be able to make money off the site, that they should be able to make money is a given, it’s about creative freedom and what defines a given service, in this case MySpace, and its users.
April 11th, 2007 at 4:24 am
[...] Robert Scoble esto pasa porque Photobucket es un servicio parásito, personalmente creo que es simplemente una decisión atada a las declaraciones que hicieron cuando [...]
April 11th, 2007 at 4:37 am
“It certainly would piss me off if I worked on WordPress.com if someone came along and made money from my user’s photos and videos.”
But why? WordPress.com allows you to embed your Podtech videos on your WordPress.com blog. The idea of embedding the Podtech player is to increase the value of Podtech. That is, for Podtech to ultimately make money.
Should WordPress.com ban this activity? I’d argue not. The point is: just because Podtech potentially wins by having its player embedded in a WordPress.com blog, it doesn’t mean that WordPress.com loses. There’s no reason why this can’t be a win-win-win situation: a win for Podtech; a win for WordPress.com; and win for the users of these services.
The problem for Photobucket is that MySpace wants to “hurt” them, presumably because MySpace sees Photobucket as offering competing services now or in the near future. MySpace probably just about holds the upper hand here right now. But it’s a close call. Photobucket has a *lot* of users… MySpace needs to be a bit careful about potentially pissing off so many users at a single stroke.
April 11th, 2007 at 5:51 am
Once the money flows in, people get crazy. Here is the major unresolved issue in our building block ecosystem: the business rules for value creation. I know what you mean when you say ‘parasitic’, but it makes it seem as though Photobucket isn’t adding value to the MS experience, which, obviously it is. Just as the other embeds and sidebar scripts we choose to run add value to the experiences we’re trying to create. I view this as more of a longterm problem for MySpace (which will not be dominate forever) than for true ecosystem players.
April 11th, 2007 at 5:55 am
MySapce is a killer application but with too many usability problem (in my modest opinion, of course
April 11th, 2007 at 5:58 am
I haven’t fixed the subdomains yet since getting it off the sun server, but you can always use http://www.sitespaces.net
Never updated, always there. Though now it’s on the cable modem in our office. I never blocked anything. Probably because I don’t care. MySpace was a dumb idea anyway. People didn’t go there to build a free website, they went there because their friends told them they were supposed to.
http://freemyspace.com/history.htm
This is what Bran Greenspan, the founder of MySpace has to say about myspace.
“It only took a matter of days for our company to get Myspace.com v1.0 live. Friendster was a very basic website so copying its core features was not a big technical hurdle.”
Like woah. Impressive.
2nd life is much of the same. It’s an MMORPG for people who are too inept for a real one. Now they’re all going to be on @home with the PS3. At least that one looks cool unlike the real lame 2nd life.
MySpace has blocked several hundreds of websites, not the least of which was photobucket. They had blocked youtube, and many other sites in the past. This is not news.
http://www.blogherald.com/2005/12/22/myspace-users-angry-over-news-corp-censorship-of-youtube/
They even filter the names of competitors websites.
MySpace is a corporate joke that went way too far.
April 11th, 2007 at 5:59 am
I think I’ve got some idea by what you mean when you call photobucket a “parasitic” service. But I wish you would flesh that idea out for us a little more.
April 11th, 2007 at 6:00 am
There is a battle shaping up here as companies move from the free-form world of the Internet to the bottom-line world of Wall Street…
* Viacom sues Google over YouTube copyright infringement, then signs a deal with Yahoo for contextual ads and internal searches on Viacom websites…
* NewsCorp blocks users from embedding Photobucket videos on MySpace profiles… allegedly to prevent possible competition.
* The new owner of the Tribune Company says that Google is stealing his content, and suggests that all MSM fight Google’s use on their News site…
What happens when a technology that fosters a spirit of virtual anarchy is forced into a world that relies entirely on rigid structure?
Moreover, can companies understand that their users are not theirs alone? Someone who has a MySpace profile (NewsCorp) might also use YouTube (Google) and Flickr (Yahoo). But the way things are going, these large companies don’t seem to want to share.
Perhaps John Nash needs to teach them his theory… if companies acted in a way that benefits both themselves and the industry, they would improve their bottom line… which is their sole motivation.
April 11th, 2007 at 6:02 am
That’s ironic, because a couple weeks ago CNN/Money had an article (http://money.cnn.com/2007/03/27/magazines/fortune/fastforward_photobucket.fortune/index.htm) where they stated that MySpace blocking links from Photobucket would be “about as likely as MySpace simply ejecting members by the millions.”
April 11th, 2007 at 6:08 am
The same company that made myspace, eUniverse, later intermix, also lost 350000 Credit card numbers when they did not secure their Microsoft SQL database.
http://www.privacytimes.com/NewWebstories/carder_priv_1_27.htm
This relates to their security issues more than banning photobucket does. Check, it IS the same people/company.
April 11th, 2007 at 6:09 am
cdUniverse was owned by eUniverse roughly at the same time as MySpace.
April 11th, 2007 at 6:42 am
“This will chill investment in parasitic services for MySpace, though.”
Wait, hold on. Who invested actual money in this?
I made a social networking site to sell software licenses when social networking was beginning to bubble, but I sure didn’t invest any money other than my time. Are you saying there is California VC for myspace parasites?
If so which ones. I want to know because I sell remote employees. Thanks.
I was sure there were only extremely small time investors in this. Like those on their own budget.
April 11th, 2007 at 7:43 am
I just started a blog about two months ago and this was probably the biggest issue that came up for me. Not specifically MySpace but free hosting vs your own.
I decided to go with my own hosting for two reasons.
1. I have complete control over the content.
2. I have complete control over the software that’s running the content.
Content control is important because I need to be able to say whatever I want (that’s the purpose of the blog). Controlling the software means you can bend it and manipulate it to your whim. I’ve added a weekly comic strip to supplement my blog and I’m now sitting down and thinking of how to change the software to suit my needs better. That might mean not using WordPress (which is what I’m using now), which I can do if I want. All this for not a whole lot a month (not too much traffic to my site yet :( ).
I think this is about *freedom*. Surrendering freedom to a 3rd party in the internet age is pretty silly. I say bite the bullet and roll your blog on your own server.
April 11th, 2007 at 7:46 am
I don’t know if I’d call Photobucket parasitic. They offer something MySpace doesn’t.
For the record, they haven’t removed the Photobucket pics on my MySpace account yet: http://www.myspace.com/elainevigneault
April 11th, 2007 at 8:42 am
“or do advertising,”
Really? What do you call embedding PodTech videos?
April 11th, 2007 at 8:51 am
It’s great to find a free service that is useful and effective. But, free is free–and with that will come limitations, frustrations, sudden changes and imperfections; heck For-Fee services are usually riddled with all of that…so in the free services world; enjoy what works well for free and then set your expectations for some level of disappointment, because it will happen. Always.
Good debate.
Jeff
April 11th, 2007 at 8:53 am
[...] Scobelizer tells it like it is: if you use a free service, don’t expect to be able to do everything you want. If you want to have complete control, roll your own - its not that hard. [...]
April 11th, 2007 at 9:09 am
Recently, Myspace.com has also been viewing third party bulletin postings (like from blip.tv) as phishing attempts.
I’m not sure if this is a legitimate security measure or an attempt to push videobloggers into uploading their videos to Myspace, but when I wrote them about the situation, I received a form letter response detailing how easy it is to upload my videos to their servers.
(shrug)
April 11th, 2007 at 9:11 am
[...] What Myspace says it what goes in this sphere. If your product piggybacks on Myspace, your fortunes are inextricably linked to the good favor of Murdoch & Co. Hey, looks like Scoble agrees with me. [...]
April 11th, 2007 at 9:15 am
LayZ: it’s very possible that WordPress.com will block PodTech’s player. They used to block it and block many other kinds of JavaScript gadgets.
As to Photobucket being parasitic, it is one of a group of companies that had as its main objective to get MySpace’ers to use it.
Photobucket was funded to the tune of $10.5 million by Trinity Ventures. TechCrunch has the details and MySpace was definitely mentioned. http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/05/14/photobucket-closes-105-from-trinity-ventures/
April 11th, 2007 at 9:17 am
I agree with you about wordpress. They are pretty good. I blog on wordpress aswell and from what I have seen they seem to have a pretty professional set up.
April 11th, 2007 at 9:18 am
It really depends what’s your goals are.
I played with WP on their hosted service. But once I decided for their plateform I went to a couple of shared server. and they all have their limitations.
So we decided to our own server. More control, but that’s also mean more work. Hopefully I have AmO with me who handling all the maintenance, as he is a wordpress wizard among other things.
Hosted by WordPress, you just post and they do all the background work for you. It gives you more time to write useful content.
April 11th, 2007 at 9:35 am
[...] network’s demise. (The comments to Arrington’s post are chock full of this sentiment). Robert Scoble does a somewhat more thoughtful job taking the opposite side, arguing that sites that profit off [...]
April 11th, 2007 at 9:36 am
I think you current stand is contradicting some of of earlier stuff
“And, it certainly would piss me off if I worked on WordPress.com if someone came along and made money from my user’s photos and videos”
Replace ‘wordpress.com’ with ViaCom and ‘my user’s’ with ‘my’. You get this -
“And, it certainly would piss me off if I worked on ViaCom if someone came along and made money from my photos and videos”. But weren’t you against viacom taking such a stance and suing YouTube?
April 11th, 2007 at 9:37 am
@22 Robert, thanks. I did not know that. All I’m saying is…product placement is also advertising ;-)
April 11th, 2007 at 9:48 am
“Photobucket was funded to the tune of $10.5 million by Trinity Ventures.”
sent and sent, thanks.
April 11th, 2007 at 9:58 am
Are you using the “standard” free WordPress hosting or did you get a special deal. Seems like I remember there was something special about it (I’m not a WordPress user).
So, how does WordPress make any money off your blog. Considering the traffic you probably generate they would definitely have some expense associated with it.
I think the Google model for Blogger, and some of their other things is (so far) goodwill based. Having a lot of things I do all in Google is a convenience as they (the various features) begin to work together more and more. Yahoo, on the other hand seems to put ads on everything. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were to run ads on top of other ads.
But how does a specialty company like WordPress monetize?
April 11th, 2007 at 10:19 am
I guess Paypal would be a parasitic service in your mind Robert?
April 11th, 2007 at 10:19 am
>seshadri: I assumed that Viacom was right in its suit against Google and would win. Still do. But that win will prove to be expensive for Viacom because it puts their growth in a box. It’s now a brand I won’t see as “new media.” Yeah, I’ll watch lots of “old and big media stuff” but that’s not where the growth in the industry is going to come from over the next decade.
>macbeach. WordPress doesn’t yet make money off of my blog. I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing ads at some point, though. That’s part of the implicit agreement you make when you go with a free hoster.
I have a special deal in that I got a custom template. Now that’s possible on their VIP program.
April 11th, 2007 at 10:22 am
Ro: yes. Paypal was definitely parasitic on eBay. That one worked out well for them. Which is why VC firms throw money at business plans like this. It probably will still work out well for Photobucket. They’ll survive on their own, even after the blood supply from MySpace was cut off. In fact, growth might even go up as MySpacers use Photobucket just to “spite” the corporate suits who screwed them.
April 11th, 2007 at 10:29 am
Didn’t MySpace promote their “300″ photo campaign a month before the film was released? This was a huge improvement to their previous limit which I believe was under 20.
Of course different people’s usage will vary, but 300 images at 5MB limit is a significant amount of image storage - especially when its free!
If we are talking about content blocking as a whole, then I think MySpace has a real issue on their hands.
On the one hand, the “free” and “wide-open” principles of media sharing is what made MySpace the darling of social networking sites.
You could host your webpage on MySpace, run a blog with that might be read by millions of other MySpacers, leave an image comment on a friends profile, and even share the lastest and greatest videos circulating online in the Forums.
This community portal aspect went hand in hand with the idea of members contributing, sharing, and evolving the whole online social networking scene.
Eventually though, MySpace hit a serious roadblock with troublemakers and kids who were all too willing to discover the latest and greatest MySpace exploit.
Spammers began by exploiting their bulletin posting system last summer. The assualt then lead to bot-flooders wrecking their own brand of havoc on the MySpace Forums.
Malicious scripting has an even longer history on MySpace, which many believed evolved from MySpace layouts being freely distributed for use, and acting as the trojan horse for external site tracking, and eventually evolving to the scale of being embedded not only in members profiles, but within image comments, the videos being shared, and also being distributed through a number of inbuilt messaging channels through the MySpace site (ie. friend requests, event invites, blog subscription invites, etc).
If MySpace used the same philosophy as eBay once did when it pioneered online social networking, and that philosophy was based on this notion that people are generally good, then MySpace had to learn the hard way that, yes, there are some good people out there. And then there are those that need to be kept honest.
With regard to blocked content, if MySpace didn’t filter flash content, phishing scripts, images from external and non-trusted sites, then it could well be blamed for not doing enough to ensure its staying power.
In the case of MySpace, being fooled the first time may well have been enough.
April 11th, 2007 at 10:31 am
[...] poco por la pelea MySpace-Photobucket y esa “denominación” de servicio parásito que le daba Scoble, me quedé pensando si realmente se pueden considerar parásitos a muchos proyectos de internet [...]
April 11th, 2007 at 10:58 am
The Quickest Way to Destroy Your Business: Turn a Symbiont into a Competitor
In biology, a symbiont is a creature that lives within a host animal in a mutually beneficial relationship. Mitochondria, which are the power plants of our cells originated as separate organisms until they found that they were better off living inside …
April 11th, 2007 at 11:11 am
I think it’s OK for Myspace to block anything they want. If they make a bad decision the free market will sort it out.
April 11th, 2007 at 11:19 am
[...] you are a user, and you may want to look at getting your own blog somewhere else, as the Scobleizer recommends. And it’s good for companies to be aware of how much their business depends on someone else, [...]
April 11th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Good points.
It would be great if you actually got the same WordPress software experience and features in a self hosted version as you get here, but alas, you don’t at this time. That is most unfortunate.
April 11th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
I don’t know how wordpress.com generates revenue, but you (Robert) being here is certainly beneficial to them - thousands of people (like me) must have learned of wordpress.com’s hosted service through your blog being here.
April 11th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Paying for private hosting has many advantages. I am hosting every image, including the layout images, on my MySpace account. It’s much easier to host comments, too. I just upload *whatever I want* to my domain using an FTP client, then copy my self-hosted URL. All this takes less time and effort than the aforementioned parasitic hosting services, plus I get over 5Gb of storage and 200Gb of monthly transfer.
Here is an example:
http://the67show.com/images/Aries2-g.gif
Thanks for the post.
-Kendall
April 11th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
To say that the relationship between photobucket and MySpace is parasitic is to imply that MySpace doesn’t get anything out of the relationship. Photobucket brings users, content, and value to the table. Symbiotic is a more accurate description.
April 11th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
[...] MySpace’ers learn harsh reality [...]
April 11th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
[...] [via Scobleizer] [...]
April 11th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
[...] MySpace’ers learn harsh reality When you host your stuff on a Web site that’s free and that you don’t control some nasty crap can happen. […] [...]
April 11th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
Social networking limitations are everywhere…what widgets you can use, whether you can get paid for the eyeballs you bring, who can see your personal content (bosses/predators/recruiters?), moving friends and content between sites, and some sites don’t even let you put HTML on your profile.
Minggl solves all of these problems TODAY and MySpace cannot block the content it serves—check it out!!
April 11th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
At least with hosting my own blog, should I ever piss off Kathy and Bert, Maryam, or even the all fired up Tim O’Reilly, the demise that met meankids and unclebobism won’t land on my doorstep.
However, I agree with you. When you go to someone else’s house for supper you get’s what you get’s….
April 11th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
I agree wordpress is a good deal to reach out to other readers. Unlike blogspot..that hosting site doesn’t do shyt. I’m glad I moved away from it.
April 11th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
[...] 11th, 2007 I was searching around wordpress and ran into this interesting article about the recent ban of all Photobucket images from MySpace. I thought it was [...]
April 11th, 2007 at 10:33 pm
WordPress.com doesn’t directly monetize Robert’s blog, but they do host adsense on many of the other blogs here and have for many months now; you won’t see them if you’re signed in to your WordPress account, but you will otherwise. But I do not know how much money this makes them.
As for MySpace, with the inroads Facebook has been making on them it is slightly to the north of INSANE for them to start making things difficult for their users. Yanking the chain of your customers and hitting them with sticks is not an effective way to make them love you.
God knows, I’ve had my trials with Photobucket over the years. They’re far from perfect. But the fact is, I have perhaps a thousand images stored there and if WordPress were to suddenly disallow embedding those images here in a brazen control grab I would go completely apeshit and so would about 600,000 other people who use this service. And so WordPress does not.
They’re also too smart to disallow Podtech embedding. The PR value of keeping Robert and his fans happy is worth quite a lot, and the boys at WP are smart.
April 12th, 2007 at 3:36 am
“…and the boys at WP are smart.”
Then why can’t they figure out how to make me a sandwich? The bread is right over there…
April 12th, 2007 at 3:41 am
[...] talks. Om Malik sees things differently and thinks Photobucket practically asked for this blockade. Robert Scoble calls Photobucket and services like it “parasitic.” Nick Carr says this is all [...]
April 12th, 2007 at 4:32 am
[...] talks. Om Malik sees things differently and thinks Photobucket practically asked for this blockade. Robert Scoble calls Photobucket and services like it “parasitic.” Nick Carr says this is all [...]
April 12th, 2007 at 5:36 am
[...] talks. Om Malik sees things differently and thinks Photobucket practically asked for this blockade. Robert Scoble calls Photobucket and services like it “parasitic.” Nick Carr says this is all [...]
April 12th, 2007 at 7:07 am
They can, they’ll get to it once they’ve responded to all these requests for Adsense and Flash embeds…
April 12th, 2007 at 8:18 am
Hmmm, interesting stuff. I’ve never been a fan of myspace, so this doesn’t really effect me. But I know a ton of people who use it.
-Matt
http://www.mattgunn.ca
April 12th, 2007 at 8:24 am
[...] talks. Om Malik sees things differently and thinks Photobucket practically asked for this blockade. Robert Scoble calls Photobucket and services like it “parasitic.” Nick Carr says this is all [...]
April 12th, 2007 at 8:53 am
I like to keep a blog as a hobby, I don’t make money from it and I have no intention to do so. I’ve used a lot of different services including having my own domain. Of all the ones I’ve tried I like WP.com the best. I paid a small amount to have a domain name here and I would actually be willing to pay for the service. Of course I do like having it free though.
April 12th, 2007 at 10:10 am
[...] Cos a major firm can switch things overnight and make or mar the future of the [...]
April 12th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
[...] popular video/photo hosting site PhotoBucket has had its services blocked on myspace. Scoble has an interesting article about it. The bottom line is that if you use a free service that free [...]
April 12th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
MySpace dumps PhotoBucket
MySpace unceremoniously dumped PhotoBucket late Tuesday night, adding the popular photo and video-sharing site to a list of companies that MySpace has restricted access to. MySpace claims that PhotoBucket was violating their TOS by generating add reven…
April 12th, 2007 at 7:21 pm
Screw MySpace. Mammals who chain themselves to dinosaurs are just begging to get crushed.
April 12th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
[...] decision. Some will really think that this will be the end of Photobucket which was called by Scoble as MySpace parasite or a backend provider and widget maker (as it was called by the [...]
April 13th, 2007 at 3:55 am
[...] Full article here [...]
April 15th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
[...] on Photobucket’s ban @ MySpace: Myspace is right, everyone else is bad, parasites [...]
January 20th, 2008 at 7:49 am
Uploading Photos and Videos to MySpace - Uploading photos to your MySpace account is fairly simple. First you must log into your account and then click on the links that says, “Add/edit photos.” You then receive a warning stating that photos which include nudity, violent or offensive materials or copyrighted images are not permitted. You can then browse through your hard drive to find the desired photo. Photos uploaded to MySpace must be .gif or .jpg format and must be smaller than 600k. Once you find an appropriate photo, click upload and the photo will be added to your account. Once a photo is added you can create a caption for this photo.