Sony ImageStation closing its doors
Sony is closing the doors on its ImageStation online photo hosting product. This is an interesting move and makes me wonder exactly how much money they were losing on this venture. Quantcast has ImageStation.com ranked at #2,994 with an estimated 790,000 unique visitors per month. With the combination of products (coffee mugs, calendars, etc.), premium memberships, and traffic to the site, it’s amazing that they are completely shutting the service down.
ImageStation has been around for quite some time and was always one of the larger sites funded by deep-pocket companies that we (SuperMotors) had to look at for competition and feature comparisons. I guess when you’re up against the likes of Shutterfly (4M uniques/mo), KodakGallery (7M uniques/mo), and Photobucket (16M uniques/mo), at only 790K uniques/mo, you are in a very distant 4th place. Not to mention the other services out there that offer photo hosting.
David vs. Goliath
This presents an interesting challenge for significantly smaller sites like ours without the deep-pocket funding. Is this a sustainable business model? How do you capture market share against companies offering arguably similar services? For us, being a part-time venture, the biggest challenge is finding the time to add value to the site and continue to improve it. We are sitting on several months of work that has yet to be launched due to the commitments of each of our collective day jobs.
At the end of the day however, we offer a very niche service to automotive enthusiasts. While photo, audio, and video hosting remain the core of the features offered, the added bells and whistles that make us unique will always set us apart from larger sites like the ones mentioned above. They cater to the masses and as a result, have to be generic in nature of their service offering. We continue to add services and features to the site that specifically support the automotive enthusiast.
Still though, it would be nice to have a name like Sony or Kodak bankrolling the operation. 
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