The folks behind file storage site Zippyshare have announced the site’s imminent closure coming at the end of the month.
“You have about two weeks” to backup your files on the service, the proprietors of Zippyshare wrote in their first blog post in nearly five years. “We’ve decided that we’re shutting down the project at the end of the month.”
Zippyshare came online in 2006. TorrentFreak was the first to note the closure.
Zippyshare’s blog seems both hurried (“information,” the first word of the title, is misspelled) and somewhat bitter.
“You have been visiting less and less over the years,” the site admonishes the reader. It’s not a claim without merit. There was a time when typing a track’s name into Google search would often autocomplete as “track title + zippyshare.” For music producers (at least those who weren’t avid users of the site themselves), just hearing the site’s name probably brings back a number of unpleasant memories.
Those times are long gone, however. For legitimate sharing of files too big or unwieldy for email, there are better ad-free options such as Dropbox, Google Drive and WeTransfer. For-profit piracy prefers to use file lockers with access restrictions to try to squeeze a few bucks out of file-hungry users. And ordinary old piracy has certainly been on the decline in this era of DRM and AppStores.
Zippyshare did offer extremely large uploads for a free, registrationless service — upwards of 500mb per upload — but it wasn’t enough to distinguish the platform from its rivals. Mssrs. Zippy strike an emo note when acknowledging this:
The blog also cites rising electricity prices and “all sorts of adblockers.” The site was notorious for its pop-up ads and lack of a paid option. Acknowledging the site’s degraded experience without using one, the authors claim that “eventually we get to the point where a vicious cycle begins, in order to pay for the server infrastructure you are forced to place more and more ads, then users fire up more and more adblockers and we get to a point like today.”
“There are still a bunch of smaller reasons,” they add, “but we could write a book on this, and probably no one would want to read it.”
