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FileFront Reopens Its Doors
boarder8925 writes "FileFront, who announced on March 24th that they would be shutting down, has been given new life. The original owners of the website bought it back from Ziff Davis Media, who shut down FileFront because it had become financially unviable. 'We're happy to announce to the gaming community that as of today, April 1st, 2009, FileFront is a completely independent company again and is no longer part of Ziff Davis Media. All previously suspended services should be active and working again. We thank Ziff Davis Media for their cooperation and willingness to keep the site and community alive.' They repeatedly state that this is not an April Fool's Day joke, and indeed the site appears to be up and running as usual."
That ease of use is probably what helped make them unprofitable, sadly. When you're the easiest place to download from, people will use you more often. FilePlanet succeeds because of its annoying queues keeping more impatient users away, while getting all the perks of being an IGN subsidiary by having all those exclusive beta keys that you can ONLY GET IF YOU'RE A PLATINUM SUPER SUBSCRIBER! As long as no one imitates MegaUpload's current captchas. Oh lordy are those awful.
Imagine a TV show complained about having too many viewers, a radio station about having too many listeners
TV and radio stations pay for bandwidth to reach a geographic area, not per viewer. They pay less per viewer when a higher percentage of viewers are tuned in, and they pay less per viewer in high-population-density areas.
More users = more ad impressions = more revenue, right? Maybe not enough to actually survive, true
As I understand it, this is the case.
but I fail to see how having less users would lead to anything but even greater losses.
The more upstream bandwidth you use, the more you pay.