Zoopy moves its hosting overseas

@acidrazor We have advertising opportunities in place and a full strategy on how to grow these in a meaningful way for advertisers and the community, but it's not that simple when it comes to offsetting local bandwidth costs. As an example, let's say that you have an advertiser paying an average CPM of R250. This works out to R250 for 1000 impressions. This isn't a problem if the 1000 impressions are photos, but if the 1000 impressions are generated from 1000 views of a 30mb video, the bandwidth locally works out to approximately R900. That's a loss of R750 to serve those 1000 views of the video. And that's just one video, and just 1000 views. If you look at international costs, 1000 views of a 30mb video works out to approximately R23. So locally this one sample instance delivers a loss of R750 locally and a profit of R227. And if the video is larger, even the international profit margin is reduced.

We've worked through a number of CDNs and as I said before, we didn't make this decision lightly or quickly.

If you're in the neighbourhood of our offices sometime, come by and we'll arrange a slightly cooler beer to make up for the one you lost :)
 
Rate My ISP said:
Do not underestimate the amount of people who visits locally hosted sites because their international bandwidth cap has been depleted. Read MyBB you will hear many references being made. That’s a lot of eyeballs. With that many bandwidth being used like Zoopy means lots of views. They could have sold their sites entire background as advertising or wrapped their video in a branded video player - like a box of OMO with a screen in the middle :D
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LOL, exactly right.
 
jasonzoopy said:
@acidrazor We have advertising opportunities in place and a full strategy on how to grow these in a meaningful way for advertisers and the community, but it's not that simple when it comes to offsetting local bandwidth costs. As an example, let's say that you have an advertiser paying an average CPM of R250. This works out to R250 for 1000 impressions. This isn't a problem if the 1000 impressions are photos, but if the 1000 impressions are generated from 1000 views of a 30mb video, the bandwidth locally works out to approximately R900. That's a loss of R750 to serve those 1000 views of the video. And that's just one video, and just 1000 views. If you look at international costs, 1000 views of a 30mb video works out to approximately R23. So locally this one sample instance delivers a loss of R750 locally and a profit of R227. And if the video is larger, even the international profit margin is reduced.

We've worked through a number of CDNs and as I said before, we didn't make this decision lightly or quickly.

If you're in the neighbourhood of our offices sometime, come by and we'll arrange a slightly cooler beer to make up for the one you lost :)
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Sweet. Will do. I'm in need of a couple of cold ones :p Might just rock up with my own six pack.

And I was just spitballing really. If you follow the trend re: YouTube and other social networking platforms like Facebook, you could potentially "serve" ads for videos within the Facebook wallpost, much like what eTV and SABC does with "brought to you by Tampax" or whatever. I'm sure the advertisers are willing to pay a little more knowing their adverts are not only displayed on Zoopy but distributed by Web 2.0 type bookmarks.

There's also more potential for more ads on the page itself. I'm not saying do the OMO idea by Rate My ISP, but having an advert between every 5 comments for example would work in getting the revenue up for 1 page view. Sure, they'll pay less for that small ad, but offset the cost with the ability to send the video post to facebook with a little "sponsored by" advert and you'll increase your CPM quite drastically.

Again, just spitballing. I get what you're saying, maybe Vodacom wasn't the best provider...
 
Oh and offsetting the cost of a popular video or image with a bigger cost for the advert might help as well
 
waynegohl said:
maybe i must leave my contact details on my zoopy videos you know just in case.........
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Florida still calling? You never know how things turn out. Telkom's monopoly might just work in your favour ;)
 
Nefertiti said:
yea and how much do they charge? And then it is in US dollars. I guess for someone earning in dollars its great, but doing the rand into dollar exchange is a blow. I feel for Zoopy. Bandwith costs for a startup is horrendous in this country. I've just moved a site internationally too. I only have a R1000 a month for hosting and bandwith. I get 700 gig included internationally, and there is no way I can afford 700 gig x R29 in South Africa. Luckily I dont have to worry about local users and their caps. Otherwise I would have considered charging them a premium for the bandwith they used.
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The price was actually very low considering the exchange rate - certainly a lot lower than what Zoopy is paying now or we wouldn't be buying into it. The additional benefits are that you don't need to invest in hardware and software either. Just remember that converting the Euro for Germany gies you a higher figure in Rands than does the US Dollar.
 
McT said:
Florida still calling? You never know how things turn out. Telkom's monopoly might just work in your favour ;)
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oh for sure. i sent my daughter over there the links to zoopy and to this forum and she also said she will see us in hollywood.
 
afrodeity said:
Zoopy is doing a great job. It is the only site in South Africa to carry criticism of some large right-wing media companies who dominate the spectrum and should therefore remain anonymous. Zoopy has bravely created a platform for journalists and is a vital contributor to the battle against newsroom censorship. Keep up the great work. We hope to see Zoopy return to local bandwidth in the near future.
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Thanks for your support David. Please keep visiting and contributing!
 
Rate My ISP said:
Do not underestimate the amount of people who visits locally hosted sites because their international bandwidth cap has been depleted.
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Not enough people to offset the cost of local hosting obviously.
 
Joy-Energiser said:
Idiocy ? Do you have any idea how to run a business that actually makes a profit ? I think you need to catch a wake up, this is not their fault but the fault of greedy South African ISP/Telecom/Whoever that continue to rip us off.
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The crazy price of hosting on the low end of the scale is part of the problem, but as it happens I do know how to run a business that makes a proffit.

The first rule of business is analysing your market space. South Africa simply doesn't have the pay-per-click market to sustain a bandwidth hungry website operation hosted locally.

For something to be successful it must scale to an international market. So if you declare "local version of..." you've already lost. The rest of the world carries on using YouTube and whatever else and your idea dies.

There's all these stupid ideas like "social networking site for real estate agents in South Africa", they will never work. Narrowing in on a market space simply doesn't work unless it's really big, you can offer something they can't get anywhere else, or you're charging for use.

This is the wonder of the internet, it's not localised. SA people don't want to be using your crappy gmail.co.za or whatever, they want the real thing and they get it, and the rest of the world doesn't care about your site in the first place. In addition to that most existing social media sites happily cater to every userbase, people don't want 100 sites for each activity they are involved in they want one Facebook, one Youtube and one Flickr (although even Flickr is dying to much of Facebook's photo sharing and is serving a niche).

The only things surviving locally are news sites (which are often heavily cross subsidised) and big SaaS vendors. Learn from it.
 
Vimeo, Daily Motion and Viddler would disagree. As would Flickr, SmugMug and more. As would a handful of web TV content destinations, which Zoopy TV sits next to quite proudly. We never set out to be an alternative because we're South African. We happen to be an alternative located in SA, which obviously influences the kind of environment we've created at Zoopy. ONE of our goals has been to create a space that is a living archive of African content. Being in Africa gives us closer ties with partners, advertisers and the immediate local community, all of which contribute to a unique flavour at Zoopy and Zoopy TV. But that's not the end of it. In fact, over the last several months, we've grown our US audience tenfold, most of whom are enjoying what Zoopy has to offer online and on mobile, in spite of (or even because of) African content. We're featured on TubeMogul next to the other large video publishers across the globe and 2010 promises to be another exciting year of growth.

Whether you choose to visit YouTube and/or Flickr and/or Vimeo and/or Zoopy is entirely up to you. Of course the more support we have from our home country the better.

P.S. We have a news show on Zoopy TV called I've Got News. It's completely independent, which has obvious advantages for our viewers. Check it out sometime: http://www.zoopy.com/tv/ive-got-news
 
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jasonzoopy said:
Vimeo, Daily Motion and Viddler would disagree. As would Flickr, SmugMug and more. As would a handful of web TV content destinations, which Zoopy TV sits next to quite proudly. We never set out to be an alternative because we're South African. We happen to be an alternative located in SA, which obviously influences the kind of environment we've created at Zoopy. ONE of our goals has been to create a space that is a living archive of African content. Being in African give us closer ties with partners, advertisers and the immediate local community, all of which contribute to a unique flavour at Zoopy and Zoopy TV. But that's not the end of it. In fact, over the last several months, we've grown our US audience tenfold, most of whom are enjoying what Zoopy has to offer online and on mobile, in spite of (or even because of) African content. We're featured on TubeMogul next to the other large video publishers across the globe and 2010 promises to be another exciting year of growth.

Whether you choose to visit YouTube and/or Flickr and/or Vimeo and/or Zoopy is entirely up to you. Of course the more support we have from our home country the better.

P.S. We have a news show on Zoopy TV called I've Got News. It's completely independent, which has obvious advantages for our viewers. Check it out sometime: http://www.zoopy.com/tv/ive-got-news
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Pay no attention to that dude, he does not understand niche markets. Using his logic you should have just stayed in bed because there was already a YouTube, Flickr, Facebook. Preposterous I tell you!
 
jasonzoopy said:
Of course the more support we have from our home country the better.
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Actually it's quite the opposite. The more we ignore local content, the higher we drive international capacity demand until at some point we start to see CDN's investing in local nodes or nearer peering to reduce their cost of shipping data to us and the same with our ISP's etc etc.

Once the hosting market have been completely and utterly ignored they'll start going out of business and be forced to compete in the international hosting market to stay alive.

No one internationally is buying Hetzner servers in SA, that would be insane. Hetzner Germany however is not competing in the space of German hosting, they are competing on the same basis as The Planet and Rackspace and whoever else.

So South African's *should* be moving their data offshore to force that economy to correct itself.
 
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cda said:
Actually it's quite the opposite. The more we ignore local content, the higher we drive international capacity demand until at some point we start to see CDN's investing in local nodes or nearer peering to reduce their cost of shipping data to us and the same with our ISP's etc etc.

Once the hosting market have been completely and utterly ignored they'll start going out of business and be forced to compete in the international hosting market to stay alive.

No one internationally is buying Hetzner servers in SA, that would be insane. Hetzner Germany however is not competing in the space of German hosting, they are competing on the same basis as The Planet and Rackspace and whoever else.

So South African's *should* be moving their data offshore to force that economy to correct itself.
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Firstly, PLUS 1 to that.

Secondly, I can't believe all the people on this thread complaining about Zoopy when the situation is mostly Telkom's fault. Cheaper IPconnect, more/cheaper local peering, cheaper upload bandwidth and so on and so on would make local hosting substantially cheaper and more viable.
It's no coincidence that most of the issues I mention are entirely Telkom's fault.
So let's lay the blame where it belongs.
Oh, and what's with all the people who can't do Maths? How exactly do you expect them to run a business with costs 100 times more than they should be? Just so you can watch videos while you're capped? Get real.
 
I think it's high time the competition commission steps in and is given power to change the industry, and the DTI is empowered to do more, because we all know that ICASA are spineless, balless SOB's.
 
You know what? Only way we'll ever get reasonable pricing IN our own country is if companies do exactly this. There is simply no other way, no amount of "politics" and "regulation" in this country ever seem to work, but taking your money elsewhere certainly does.

Just looking at my monthly bill from Amazon [i store all my stuff in the "cloud"] that tends to come to a whopping amount of $0.50-$2.00 for a crapload of storage and data flowing in and out, compared to what it would cost locally...sorry someone needs to catch a wakeup call and if ISPs need to close down for that to happen , so be it. The internet is globalization in full motion afterall, there's no such thing as "local is lekker" on the web...seriously.

Plus the way Telkom structures their local vs international packages for us consumers , things are just plain absurd. The only way to get to your local bandwidth is use up your international cap...hellooooo (yes i know there's tricks with multiple accounts, but the question still remains as to WHY we need to hop through hoops to use local bandwidth??).
 
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I didn't realise Zoopy was ever hosted locally as I've never been able to use my local b/w to access the site. I guess either my RouteSentry routing was not working at the time or it was when they were hosted internationally :(
 
jasonzoopy said:
IGN uses Akamai to deliver their media. Akamai has servers distributed globally, including South Africa. We were in talks with Akamai for months but the bottom line is that in 2005, Akamai decided to comply with South African regulatory restrictions, which means that since 2005 Akamai has not been allowed to take on any new clients (us, for example) that are headquarted in South Africa or have the majority of their traffic coming from South Africa. Like I said, we are constantly looking at ways to come back home, so we pursued all alternatives before going back offshore.
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This is very shocking, is it even legal!!
 
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