Zippyshare was considered a popular file hosting service for many years. Now, unfortunately, the company has to withdraw from the market. Despite an impressive 45 million visitors per month, sales are simply too low. Among other things, the service sees the increased use of add-blockers as the cause.
Zippyshare can no longer operate economically
Zippyshare itself describes itself as “a dinosaur” in the file hosting service space in a report by the blog TorrentFreak. Considering almost 17 years of the company’s existence, one can definitely underline this choice of words. This is all the more true in the fast-moving and, unfortunately, often short-lived times that Internet companies have always experienced. At the end of March, the company is to cease operations. The reason for this is quite simply economic problems, as the company continues to state. Zippyshare makes no secret of its main source of income. The service profited primarily from advertising placements. However, since ad blockers are being used more and more frequently on the part of users, they could no longer generate sufficient revenue.
A tough decision
Since its founding in 2006, Zippyshare has always been committed to offering its service free of charge. In doing so, they relied on advertising financing, which in the age of ad blockers of course works anything but well. But obviously the growing competition seems to be the reason for the end. The operators themselves are being reasonable and say that “the very simple formula of our offer is slowly being exhausted”. In the statement, they also refer to the fancier look and wider-ranging functions of the other providers. Heavy parting words like “no one needs a dinosaur like us anymore.” are more than appropriate given the company’s long existence.
The announcement of Zippyshare’s end came as a surprise and a clear one. After the company left its website virtually untouched visually for almost five years, the announcement of the website closure was all the more eye-catching. The company immediately used its own website for this purpose. There they announced “to stop the project at the end of the month” and pointed out to their users to make “backup copies of your important files”. For the backup copies, the file hosting dino wants to give its customers just under two more weeks. During this period, Zippyshare should also continue to run as usual.
- Also interesting: Illegal file hosting portal Streamz has been blocked
An eventful company history
Actually, over the many years, Zippyshare proved to be a company that does not give up easily. Quite the opposite, in fact. As the file hosting service has survived some turbulent phases, it can by no means be accused of throwing in the towel too soon now. Especially when the big competitor Megaupload was closed in 2012, the service was confronted with hard times. User numbers shrank rapidly because users were afraid of copyright lawsuits. In addition, the service had to remove millions of URLs from its own platform because rights holders had sued. Of course, the whole thing also came with hefty fines. But Zippyshare proved to have staying power and fought its way through this phase as well.
But in the end, it’s not rights holders that spell the end of the service. Instead, it is the users themselves who rob Zippyshare of its economic foundation. Although nearly 45 million users are active on the file hoster’s website month after month, it is not enough to operate economically. After all, simply too many users rely on ad blockers. As a result, the provider’s economic model is collapsing like a house of cards. Especially in times of rising energy costs, which Internet companies in particular are facing, this is no longer sustainable. Given its ongoing success, the end of the service is exceedingly sad. For example, TorrentFreak’s report shows that Zippyshare is still one of the world’s top 1000 visited websites today.
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