Smugmug's Future
Eileron
Registered Users Posts: 23 Big grins
I'm not entirely sure where this should go - and I know you're going to love this post considering it's the first.
Intro:
I've been lurking around for awhile, heavily debating basically every photo site out there, including hosting my own. Basically I don't want to deal with installing and managing all the plugins for myself, and I've since concluded Smugmug's the way to go (flickr feels too...I don't know, I get images of people jumping around with cameras going "Yay pretty!" instead of thinking about the shot itself, and, y'know, the metaphysical ramifications of clicking the shutter.
The little things like that.
Originally I was holding off until I head to Japan this summer (which'll be when I get the equipment and get through testing, etc) to open the account, but tonight something occurred to me. Simple question, I suppose, and probably one that could be very hard to answer (in detail).
The meat:
Where is Smugmug going? I ran a search on the forums and didn't find anything significant turn up, and perhaps it's off somewhere and I just haven't noticed, but I'm pretty curious. From the reports I've read, Smugmug's been getting more involved with things outside of itself.
Don't get me wrong, using Amazon's S3 is brilliant and could likely speed everything up. But it pulls absolute control away from Smugmug. Also, historically Smugmug's refused to be bought out - I like the title they place on Smugmug as "anti web2.0" when it has come to embody such.
Smugmug has become, in essence, an online application. That's awesome - but where will Smugmug be in 10 years?
Ex:
1) You do say you won't be bought out, but the irony there is that being bought out by someplace like Google, or Yahoo, or, dare I say it, Amazon would bring an edge of "stability" to the whole operation. People've heard of those websites: they're massive, heck, they even have stock you can buy. They aren't going anywhere (at least, not until Google devours them. But that's another story.) I suppose this wasn't really a question, just a "how will you all respond?" kindof thing.
2) The "hosted on four servers in three locations" I keep hearing about - well, this is off topic, but how does that work? S3?
3) How much of Smugmug is going to be smugmug? If you buy processing power and harddrive space, what do you become? Fun for the philosophers out there....
4) Is Smugmug growing, or shrinking? I'm assuming growing, as you have the ability to suggest to others when another service would be a better fit (impressive, by the way - it annoys me when a site goes out of their way to seduce you into buying them...I mean, it's like you're standing on a streetcorner in a dark city and...oh, but I digress). However, could Smugmug survive if the userbase began to dwindle? Alternate wording to question: If growth stopped, is the company stable, or do you rely on growth when you plan for the year ahead?
I suppose I find that important because there's always a limit to how large something can grow.
5) I feel like I should have a fifth question/suggestion just to round it out, so here's some pro/con debate.
Pro:
- I like that you suggest other sites if people don't feel warm and fuzzy here.
- I especially like the CEO's comments on other blogs. That's impressive, and while great PR of course, I think represents the personal level of involvement with this...which was the motivation behind my asking about major companies and their, shall we say, abundant cleavage.
- Community feels like it enjoys photography for more reasons than feeling a compensatory effect in buying large lenses and waving them around alot.
- Galleries feel individual - other services you pay money for make you feel like you paid money to join the group...cause everyone's doing it, you should too. Brings me back to pro one.
Cons:
- Can't buy parts of the packages individually - I'd love to pay 5 dollars a year extra to take off the "Smugmug" logo at the top to make it feel integrated into a blog...because as a novice, I don't need the CSS and print-selling options.
- The only free packages I know of are for developers, which is awesome - and I'm probably being greedy - but, for me, I'm focused towards a medical tract, and programming's barely even a hobby. It's a very selective deal from which some could infer a false demographic to make up your population.
- Individualized gallery - to my knowledge there's no "common place" where public photos all show up in a public gallery. This would be nice as a derivative site - some may argue "it's flickrish" but it would certainly open up the community. Making it an option allows people who want to get involved to get involved. (On second thought, I suppose dgrin is alot like that).
- Hmmm. A midroad con, I suppose - Smugmug doesn't seem to have a 3, or 5, or 10 year plan. This isn't necessarily a con, yes, as it makes Smugmug very versatile. However, it also makes it more difficult to know that in 10 years I'll still have those pictures I took way back when online and accessible. Naturally you can't account for what may happen, etc, but the plan can't really hurt, can it?
One thing I'd like to say: Revolutionize something. Push the envelope, so something that's never been done before. I know you all aren't probably hyperadvanced devlopers, but if you free up some cash using Amazon, you can either profit - or redefine the genre of photosharing. Additionally, if you wanted a 2 year or so plan...well, that'd be a good mission statement for it, wouldn't it?
I think that's good for now though. You can likely tell this is less about whether or not I join and more a condensed concern-release about joining. Thank goodness I'm an impulsive buyer.
Best,
D
Intro:
I've been lurking around for awhile, heavily debating basically every photo site out there, including hosting my own. Basically I don't want to deal with installing and managing all the plugins for myself, and I've since concluded Smugmug's the way to go (flickr feels too...I don't know, I get images of people jumping around with cameras going "Yay pretty!" instead of thinking about the shot itself, and, y'know, the metaphysical ramifications of clicking the shutter.
The little things like that.
Originally I was holding off until I head to Japan this summer (which'll be when I get the equipment and get through testing, etc) to open the account, but tonight something occurred to me. Simple question, I suppose, and probably one that could be very hard to answer (in detail).
The meat:
Where is Smugmug going? I ran a search on the forums and didn't find anything significant turn up, and perhaps it's off somewhere and I just haven't noticed, but I'm pretty curious. From the reports I've read, Smugmug's been getting more involved with things outside of itself.
Don't get me wrong, using Amazon's S3 is brilliant and could likely speed everything up. But it pulls absolute control away from Smugmug. Also, historically Smugmug's refused to be bought out - I like the title they place on Smugmug as "anti web2.0" when it has come to embody such.
Smugmug has become, in essence, an online application. That's awesome - but where will Smugmug be in 10 years?
Ex:
1) You do say you won't be bought out, but the irony there is that being bought out by someplace like Google, or Yahoo, or, dare I say it, Amazon would bring an edge of "stability" to the whole operation. People've heard of those websites: they're massive, heck, they even have stock you can buy. They aren't going anywhere (at least, not until Google devours them. But that's another story.) I suppose this wasn't really a question, just a "how will you all respond?" kindof thing.
2) The "hosted on four servers in three locations" I keep hearing about - well, this is off topic, but how does that work? S3?
3) How much of Smugmug is going to be smugmug? If you buy processing power and harddrive space, what do you become? Fun for the philosophers out there....
4) Is Smugmug growing, or shrinking? I'm assuming growing, as you have the ability to suggest to others when another service would be a better fit (impressive, by the way - it annoys me when a site goes out of their way to seduce you into buying them...I mean, it's like you're standing on a streetcorner in a dark city and...oh, but I digress). However, could Smugmug survive if the userbase began to dwindle? Alternate wording to question: If growth stopped, is the company stable, or do you rely on growth when you plan for the year ahead?
I suppose I find that important because there's always a limit to how large something can grow.
5) I feel like I should have a fifth question/suggestion just to round it out, so here's some pro/con debate.
Pro:
- I like that you suggest other sites if people don't feel warm and fuzzy here.
- I especially like the CEO's comments on other blogs. That's impressive, and while great PR of course, I think represents the personal level of involvement with this...which was the motivation behind my asking about major companies and their, shall we say, abundant cleavage.
- Community feels like it enjoys photography for more reasons than feeling a compensatory effect in buying large lenses and waving them around alot.
- Galleries feel individual - other services you pay money for make you feel like you paid money to join the group...cause everyone's doing it, you should too. Brings me back to pro one.
Cons:
- Can't buy parts of the packages individually - I'd love to pay 5 dollars a year extra to take off the "Smugmug" logo at the top to make it feel integrated into a blog...because as a novice, I don't need the CSS and print-selling options.
- The only free packages I know of are for developers, which is awesome - and I'm probably being greedy - but, for me, I'm focused towards a medical tract, and programming's barely even a hobby. It's a very selective deal from which some could infer a false demographic to make up your population.
- Individualized gallery - to my knowledge there's no "common place" where public photos all show up in a public gallery. This would be nice as a derivative site - some may argue "it's flickrish" but it would certainly open up the community. Making it an option allows people who want to get involved to get involved. (On second thought, I suppose dgrin is alot like that).
- Hmmm. A midroad con, I suppose - Smugmug doesn't seem to have a 3, or 5, or 10 year plan. This isn't necessarily a con, yes, as it makes Smugmug very versatile. However, it also makes it more difficult to know that in 10 years I'll still have those pictures I took way back when online and accessible. Naturally you can't account for what may happen, etc, but the plan can't really hurt, can it?
One thing I'd like to say: Revolutionize something. Push the envelope, so something that's never been done before. I know you all aren't probably hyperadvanced devlopers, but if you free up some cash using Amazon, you can either profit - or redefine the genre of photosharing. Additionally, if you wanted a 2 year or so plan...well, that'd be a good mission statement for it, wouldn't it?
I think that's good for now though. You can likely tell this is less about whether or not I join and more a condensed concern-release about joining. Thank goodness I'm an impulsive buyer.
Best,
D
0
Comments
As for not having a section where the public photos all together show up - have you checked the following two links?
global browse section
global keyword section
This is actually what many people complain about - they can't have their photos public and opt out of these global sections yet. There's a 26 pages thread about that topic and in recent posts the SM team said that they're working hard on a solution for people.
Interesting question where SM will be in 5 or 10 years - I don't really know, all I know that they've been around for almost 7 years now or even more, but that's the date of the first public news on the homepage. I really hope they can continue on this path of constant developement and still manage to be in control of everything.
Sebastian
SmugMug Support Hero
Actually, it gives us tons more control
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2006/08/12/amazon-s3-the-holy-grail/
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2006/08/28/take-a-peek-inside-our-datacenters/
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2006/11/10/amazon-s3-show-me-the-money/
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/03/30/etech-2007-smugmug-amazon-slides-are-up/
We are profitable, independent, and debt-free. We like this, a lot
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Nice first post.
We've watched so very many photo sharing sites from Adobe, Microsoft, HP, Epson, Canon, Nikon, Best Buy, Sony and many other respected big companies die or become irrelevant. It isn't because they didn't have the money, brand, management, or financial stability. It's because they didn't care about it as passionately as we do.
Long time dgrinners can tell you the key to our success is hiring people who love photos and sharing them. The passionate dgrin people who joined us like BigWebGuy, Barb, Ivar, Cavig, Andy, Devbobo, SteveM, MikeLane and others will tell you why we answer email so quickly and all the other things that set us apart.
I hope this helps.
Thanks,
Chris
Not too long ago, none of those companies were heard of, well known, or stable. (One could argue they're still not stable, like GMail).
I think we'll just keep building the best company we can and see how it plays out. I'm no fortune teller, so I don't know, either.
I do know, though, that the cultures at Google and Yahoo don't seem to be a good match for SmugMug's, and if they were to acquire us, SmugMug's spirit would likely die. That's what I'm trying to avoid.
Yep, S3. We continue to expand our own operations, too. We currently have four datacenters in three states ourselves, though some of them are currently limited. We'll see.
I consider SmugMug to be the customer experience. Everything from the user-interface to customer support, and everything in between. Our datacenters, servers, and storage are just a necessary evil that gets in the way of spending 100% of our time on the customer experience.
The more time we get to spend serving our customers and not installing and fixing hardware, the better.
We are growing. A lot. We've even discussed what we would do in the event that growth continues to accelerate and actually harms our ability to serve our current customers. (Yes, we do have a plan for that).
If we stopped growing, which is difficult to imagine, yes, we'd be fine. If we started shrinking, that would be the time to worry, though.
Thanks!
Interesting. I don't think we get asked this a lot, but we sorta hate it when sites, products, or services get too big of a "menu" and the pricing gets confusing. We like, and, so far, our customers like, that the pricing structure is simple and easy to understand. But this is great feedback!
We have two "lifetime free Pro accounts" programs currently running. One is for developers, and one is for non-profit organizations. We have thousands of those and we love to help them get their message across, whether it's an elementary school or a charity raising money for sick kids.
I'm not sure I understand this one, but would love to have you elaborate on it.
We do. Our X year plan is simple: First and foremost, keep our customers ecstatically happy. Secondly, add more customers. Rinse, lather, repeat.
We don't have a mantra or mission statement or anything, but if I had to come up with one on the spot, it'd be "Passionate Photographers." 10 years from now, we'll still care about anyone who's passionate about photography, whether it's the art of the photography itself (Pros) or the subject matter (soccer moms) and everything in between.
Actually, we are hyperadvanced developers.
The list goes on, but it's pretty rare that a month or two goes by without us doing something revolutionary for our customers. We have 2 or 3 big huge ones in the works as I type this. But we never talk about upcoming features before we're ready, so that might be what's throwing you off.
Thanks so much for your feedback and questions. We love customers who are passionate about the products they use, especially ours, and can't wait to see how much value you're going to add to the future of our company. It's fairly obvious it could be a lot.
Don
To me, the greatest market growth potential for SmugMug, and by result its photographers, would be to capitalize on the shifting paradigm in the stock photography market.
The largest companies have become corporate commodities gobbling up market share to "unleash the power of their portfolio" or "maximize shareholder value" while losing sight of their core business - i.e. the current big corporate model of short term profit over long-term stability and sustainable growth. The ones getting the shortest end of the stick are the suppliers/workers; in this case, photographers.
Enter SmugMug. With implementation of an image licensing option for its pro user accounts, SmugMug seems to be signaling its interest in unleashing the power of its user base in the stock photo marketplace. It's a hesitant first step, however, and if rumors reported on CNET and other forums prove to be true, SmugMug will have missed this golden opportunity when Flickr unveils its vision for the future of stock in a big way.
Then again, I could be wrong.
These quoted words above are THE essence that sets Smugmug apart from most other onlne businesses of any kind, certainly from the other photo-related services. My 2 cents is to just keep doing more and more of this and the rest will take care of itself. You guys have it right so far.
I've seen so many businesses fall off track when they lose their focus on "delighting the customer" and "making customers for life". You do also have to figure out how to generate enough cash flow in order to be able to keep doing the rest of it, but fortunately you already seem to have figured out that formula. I think you actually do have an internal mantra or mission, you just haven't committed it to paper and a common set of words.
Keep doing what you're doing. It's rare in the online world and even less common in the business world in general.
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We don't own the fiber that connects our servers to our customers desktops either, but we're constantly adding vendors who have the current best performance. Seems like a very strong position to be in.
Anyone or company who thinks they have absolute control is kidding themselves. I haven't seen many companies build their own power plants (every company depends on multiple vendors).
Today, in the pro space, I think SmugMug's strong suit is as an order fullfillment service for photographer's taking commisioned photos--weddings, portraits, sports, children, and so forth. The highly customizable web presence works well when you as a photographer maintain a personal relationship with your customers. That is something that I doubt very much Flickr will ever be.
The stock photography business Flickr looks like it is heading for is the antithesis of that: dropping your images in a pool with tens of thousands of other photographers and hope you get found. There is no personal realtionship or real identity as a photographyer there. That said, there is the potential to develop a level visibility in the social-networking context of Flickr that is much more difficult in the context of SmugMug.
My current thinking is that when I have a stong enough portfolio of shots to start getting serious about promoting myself as a stock photographer, I am going to use Flickr as one of my primary tools for promotion. However, my plan is to only upload low rez watermarked images to Flickr and try to continue to use SmugMug for order fullfillment.