Spit & Image

You know, they could have warned us, or something...

To All Free Users of Villagephotos.com
At this time, most of you are aware that external linking for the free accounts has been shut off. Free accounts are still able to upload and store images in their accounts, but you are unable to link them at this time.

The change that we had to make, came as a very hard decision for us. We were supporting over a half million free users, doing over 20 million image hits a day. Lately, we have been getting an average of 5 thousand new free users a day, signing up and we got to a point where we were unable to support all of these free users without our service suffering for our paid users. We have more than enough equipment to support all of our paid users and many, many more, a long time into the future, but it is getting to the point where it is no longer within our budget or good business sense, to continue spending tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and thousands and thousands of dollars a month on bandwidth, just to support free users.

We know that our free users depend on our service and we have every intention of bringing back the free service, with external linking abilities in the near future. There will most likely be some changes with the free service, but at this time we are unsure of what they will be. We are working on finding a solution that will allow us to continue to have free users, but will not cost us more money than our budget will allow. As soon as we have a solution in place, we will post something. At this point I don't have a time frame, but hopefully within the next week. We will keep you updated through the account page.

Also, it is not our intention to "force" our free users to pay, as some of you have voiced. We have been providing a free service for three years now and would like to continue to do so, but not if it is going to put us out of business completely. We hate losing any of our users, whether you are free or paid, but you all have choices and we are not forcing you to make any choice that you do not want to make. We are not trying to force you to do anything, we are just looking out for our paid users and our business. Hundreds of image hosting companies go out of business each year, due to poor business practice and we refuse to be one of those businesses, just so that we can keep supporting hundreds of thousands of free users.

Hundreds? Somehow I doubt it. And, hey, guys--pissing off your constituency by cutting the legs out from under them without warning isn't exactly a sound business practice either. Neither is assuming a snotty, finger-wagging tone.

Nor is being simultaneously condemnatory and venal; the reason they didn't give us a week's notice, of course, is that it would have resulted in a mass migration away from their service. This stick-with-us-while-we-figure-something-out tactic (and the simultaneous heavy guilt-trip) is as obnoxious as it is transparent: what it boils down to is we're keeping our options open.

If VillagePhotos were your boyfriend, it would be saying "I think we should see other people. By which it would mean, "I think I should fuck whoever I want for a while, and you should wait until I say we're going steady again."

(Peppering the notice with typographical errors and misplaced commas, misusing the adverb hopefully, and switching between we and I--implying that the whole business consists of one guy in his bedroom, which, for all I know, it might--didn't score VillagePhotos any "professionalism" points in my book, either.)

One of the things on my to-do list for 2004 is to get my own website up and running. Not a minute too soon, either.

In the meantime, enjoy my red X's.