Slashdot Mirror
FileFront Shutting Down
Axodious writes "As of March 30th, FileFront, one of the most popular repositories for sharing online gaming videos, will be suspended due to the recent economic downfall. In a brief post, FileFront's management said, 'We regret to inform you that due to the current economic conditions we are forced to indefinitely suspend the FileFront site operations on March 30, 2009. If you have uploaded files, images or posted blogs, or if you would like to download some of your favorite files, please take this opportunity to download them before March 30th when the site will be suspended.' With FileFront shutting down, what will be next? Fileplanet?"
Agreed, everytime I was looking for a file and the only hosts were filefront and fileplanet I figured I didn't really need the file and went to go do something else.
It's pretty much the same with Rapidshare etc... these day. If I can't get it from a website that isn't a pain to use or a torrent it's not important enough to download.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
Are you crazy, $20 million? WTF is wrong with you, $20 billion more like. Okay, $40 billion, you talked me into it. This is a crisis WORSE THAN THE GREAT DEPRESSION, duh? To hell with it, new plan: we send $1 billion to everyone in the USA, that will -seriously- ramp up spending, I'm super seriously. And don't you dare call this trying to dig your way out of a hole :P
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
Blizzard's BT client does have an option to disable the p2p function and directly download the patch from their servers. This is generally significantly faster than using the p2p option anyway.
Posting anonymously becuase I'm going against Slashdot groupthink, and am likely to be modded down.
This is probably what killed their site. Hosting -- once you get to the large VPS/dedicated server level -- is expensive. Hosting for a high bandwidth site is extremely expensive.
They couldn't pay their bills because advertising on the 'net is a failing industry. The reason for that is people like you blocking adverts.
I'm sure plenty of people will reply to this saying that adverts on many sites suck, are intrusive and annoying. Well, maybe, but that doesn't mean you should block all ads on every site. How are medium-large site owners supposed to pay their bills?
Working on the Internet is an utterly thankless task sometimes.
The reason for that is people like you blocking adverts.
The sites don't get money from just people who visit the site and see the ads, people have to actually click them. I understand your point but your theory presumes that people who block the ads would click them if they didn't block them.
Before I began using Firefox with adblock I considered ads as mainly a nuisance because, like you said, they were often intrusive and made it harder to find the stuff I was looking for from the site. Due to this I simply learned to ignore the ads and I can count on one hand's fingers the occasions on which I actually clicked some ad.
The problem is not with the people. People block the ads because they're annoying and hence not very interesting. The problem is the ads themselves. The advertisement tactic used in the net is too much based on the same tactic companies use on the streets: The bigger the better. On the streets this work because the bigger and more colourful the ad is the more chance there is that people will notice it. However, when you make the ads on the net big, colourful and often moving (sometimes even with sound effects) and then fill a webpage with these ads they stop working and instead of arousing interest you're just making people annoyed.
I can't see why people would click on ads they consider irritating even if they would see them. Now that there are free and easy-to-use tools that efficiently block the ads of course people will use it, but it's not their "fault", it's the advertisers fault for making ads too damn frustraiting. So in short: Ad blocking is not the cause, it's an effect. The core of the problem lies within the business model of web advertising.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead