GoDaddy announced its new Online Photo Filer this morning, just in time for the holidays. Citing a Photo Marketing Association International report (Powerpoint), the company says 20.5 million digital camera were sold in 2005; “digital photography is here to stay”. (It seems a bit behind the times to quote this stat, considering that PhotoBucket has 30 million members?)
Online Photo Filer (which could use a catchier name?) costs $2.99/month (with 3 month minimum). But in order to use the service, you must register a domain name (why?). On the bright side, GoDaddy offers a $1.99 (plus $0.25 ICANN fee) domain package deal. As an incentive, new customers get 10 free 4×6 prints (shipping is extra). During the signup process, you’ll also be offered a website, an email account, a blog, a $16.99 copyright protection service (with $45 filing fee).
I’ve always admired GoDaddy’s cross selling persistence, but I think the company needs tighter integration across its products. The site builder, blogging platform and photo hosting service all have separate storage/bandwidth limits, admin interfaces and templates. In contrast, the folks at Zoho offer single sign-on across all of their applications, as well as the ability to embed data from their online spreadsheet, for instance, on documents created with their wiki.
GoDaddy COO Warren Adelman says Online Photo Filer is better than other photo sharing services on the market because your albums won’t be hosted under long and impossible to remember URLs, and your friends can view your photos without the hassle of logging in. Apparently he’s not familiar with Flickr? Flickr’s $24.95/year service (which is $9.57 cheaper) offers unlimited photo uploads, by the way, compared with GoDaddy’s 150 GB/bandwidth and 2.5 GB storage. Even free Flickr accounts include 100 GB monthly data transfer. And QOOP, Flickr’s photo printing partner, will give you 10 free prints too.
I’m especially disappointed that GoDaddy doesn’t support tagging and searching *across* user accounts, or the creation of multi-user photo groups. Those are the features I like best about Flickr. Online Photo Filer also doesn’t encourage users to embed photos on MySpace, eBay or other communities. That’s part of what drives PhotoBucket’s 80,000 new signups per day. Last but not least, GoDaddy doesn’t capitalize on the camera phone trend that the Photo Marketing Association International reports also talks about. Flickr and Photobucket both offer mobile uploads, as does Radar.net, a new “picture conversation” service, where users can store, share and comment on cell phone photos.
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