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Website owner feels the pain of a bad economy as he chooses to keep his website alive even as his costs skyrocket.
Website xshots.com supports non-profits by offering free advertising, serving 90,000 views a day.
Xshots.com is a free website that allows people to post their pictures online to share with others.
"Most of the people that use xshots.com are young people, mostly bloggers from livejournal.com who need to post their pictures online. My site started as a upload page I put on my war site http://www.gulfwarrior.org as a way to upload their pictures. I thought it was a great service to people." says Rod Deluhery, the solo owner running xshots.com
| | - really liked this site called livejournal.com, which is a blog I use. I use it as a information portal, where in one place I can read all these discussions about things I'm interested in. Livejournal.com is a warehouse of electronic history, ideas and thoughts. I knew that blogs like livejournal.com needed places to upload pictures to go with the stories.
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I had a urge to start a business, and I started to think seriously about a paid online service, maybe something to help post pictures to http://www.livejournal.com or wherever. But I had this feeling it was going to be a money pit. I figured if I was going to burn money on a business, I might as well either
1. have some fun or
2. do some good and help people out.
so I decided on the latter.
| | - started xshots.com with the design that it would be used as a digital printing press. I didn't realize it would be mostly youth that ended up using it. I started putting out linked banners to some groups I volunteered for. Groups like AmeriCorps, that I think are great for young adults. Of course I got paid for none of this, except a FEW people who paid for accounts on my site. I was surprised how many people honestly told me they had no money or a job to spend on something like my website. It made me feel lucky I even had a job.
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Then I started putting URLs on pictures that people were uploading. The idea was that I could get thousands of people to see a message every single day if I embedded the message on peoples pictures. I started with a 200kbit sDSL line but that started to get slow as my site grew. I was getting about 20 new users every day and about 50,000 image downloads a day. It's like an addiction, when you see something going and people really enjoying the service, you want to work hard on it. I thought I should get more bandwidth, even though then (and now) I don't see the site making money. So I upgraded to a T1 line, which in my area is not cheap. Now I have about 90 thousand downloads a day, and I have the room to grow. I just will have to see how long I feel like donating my money to this "experiment" in helping people. I would like to find some group or ISP willing to pay part of the bill, so far I haven't been able to. I'm looking for companies needing advertising to youths as well. That might help me cover some of my expenses I hope anyway."
Any non-profits interested in putting up a banner or message to our youth can give me a call. Any ISP or provider that is interested in donating network bandwidth or servers can also contact Rod at 866 317 7360 or rod@xshots.com
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