Zippyshare Quits After 17 Years, 45m Visits per Month Makes No Money!

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Zippyshare, a file-hosting site that has been around for almost 17 years, will shut down at the end of the month. Zippyshare was started in 2006 and was known for being a free, no-frills way to store files online.

Since Zippyshare hasn’t changed much over the years, its owners say it’s now a “dinosaur” that costs too much to run in a world where most people block ads.

When file-hosting service Zippyshare started up for the first time in September 2006, you couldn’t use an iPhone to get to the site because Apple didn’t announce the iPhone’s presence for another four months.

Zippyshare’s success was built on strong but simple foundations: simple, free file storage with a clean interface that didn’t cost the user anything. Zippyshare was a huge success because there were not many other choices like it.

To celebrate its first birthday, Zippyshare went BIG.

“Zippyshare.com turned one year old a few days ago,” its owners wrote in 2007. “To celebrate Zippyshare’s first birthday, we’re letting files get up to 100 MB in size.”

Upgrade After Upgrade

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Zippyshare kept adding new features to keep up with growing demand. Finally, they released Zippyshare Uploader, a piece of software that let users upload files without using a web browser.

Almost three years after the 100 MB cap was put in place out of the blue, Zippyshare doubled it to 200 MB.

A little while later, when Megaupload was shut down and everyone was talking about it, Zippyshare kept going as if nothing had happened, or at least it did once its email systems were fixed.

Read More:

After Five Years of Silence, Zippyshare Has Bad News

When the site’s owners said yesterday that they were shutting it down, it was the first update on the site in almost five years. “We’ve agreed that the project will end at the end of this month. You have about two weeks to make copies of your important files.

“Until then, nothing will change on the site,” says the message. Zippyshare has gotten visible updates over the years, in addition to hardware upgrades, but the view for users has kept mostly the same.

As the market for file storage grew and the competition got tougher, being zippy was still good, but it wasn’t enough.

A Simple Formula Meets Innovation and Ad-Blocking on a Large Scale

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“Since 2006, we have been on the market in the same way, that is, as free file storage that is paid for by ads. But you’ve been coming less and less over the years, because the services we offer are based on a simple formula that is slowly losing its power,” Zippyshare says.

“I think all the file-saving services that are competing on the market look better, work better, and have more features. No one wants a monster like us anymore.

Even though Zippyshare isn’t likely to ever be as popular as it once was, tens of millions of people still visit it every month. The trouble is that users still block ads even when they get a free service.

This almost promises a downward spiral for sites like Zippyshare, which is made worse by the fact that energy costs are going up. “Yes, we all use ad blockers, but they take away the site owner’s ability to control the site.

“Eventually, we get to a point where a vicious cycle starts. To pay for the server infrastructure, you have to put up more and more ads. Users then use more and more adblockers, and we end up where we are now,” the site says.

“Over the past year, the price of power has gone up 2.5 times. With a lot of servers, this means that our costs have gone up a lot, and we don’t know how to fix them.

There are still a lot of smaller reasons [to shut down], but we could write a whole book about them and no one would probably want to read it.

“In short, we can no longer afford to keep the site up and running.”