Transparency reports and one million visitors
One million visitors!
As of April 2014, MediaCrush has served over one million unique users! Thank you so much for using MediaCrush, we've had loads of fun making it and we're glad that you all like it so much. I'm Drew DeVault (aka SirCmpwn), one of the two minds behind MediaCrush. My friend Jose Diez (jdiez) and I started working on MediaCrush 9 months ago after a quick little chat:
<SirCmpwn> I'm thinking of making a website for hosting gifs
<SirCmpwn> but when you upload a gif, it converts it to ogv and renders it with HTML5 video
<SirCmpwn> faster load time + better quality
<jdiez> hmmmm
<jdiez> sounds like a great idea
<SirCmpwn> I bought gifquick.com
<SirCmpwn> .net
<jdiez> not one of your best names
<SirCmpwn> you're a name
Of course, we got a name that didn't suck (as much), and we've grown quite a bit more than our original vision. We decided that the world needed an open-source, privacy-first place to host videos, audio, and images. Hell, at first, I just wanted a place to host my own stuff - but why not make it available to the world?
Here's a quick little history of what we've done since then, for nostalgia's sake.
- 2013-07-12: We start working on a simple little open-source website
- 2013-07-14: The first GIF is uploaded to "gifquick.net"
- 2013-07-18 (7:43 PM): Unbork it
- 2013-07-18 (7:46 PM): Unbork it properly
- 2013-07-19: We start blogging about MediaCrush
- 2013-07-25: Fix it, for really reals this time
- 2013-07-27: Bump logo down a pixel
- 2013-08-09: MediaCrush posted on Hacker News, first third party contributor offers some code
- 2013-08-14: Archive.org archives MediaCrush for the first time and MediaCrush opens a public API
- 2013-10-12: Revert "Revert 1de708"
- 2013-10-14: Add the sexiest beta banner there has ever been
- 2013-11-16: Temporarily unbreak everything
- 2013-11-21: MediaCrush leaves beta and launches properly
- 2013-12-02: Bitcoin hits $1000, the world goes nuts
- A bunch of other stuff, there have been 1652 changes and I got tired of reading them
We really do appreciate all that you guys have done to support us. I'm glad to have been a part of MediaCrush, and I look forward to serving you all in the future. And of course, thanks to Kevin Granger, who built this wonderful confetti thingy - without which, this blog post would be lame.
Now, to hold up to the principles we were founded on - this month's transparency reports are ready.
This month, we added Gittip to our list of services you can donate with. However, we haven't yet sorted out all the issues with actually getting money from them, so they won't be included in this month's reporting. That being said, we're very optimistic about it - we currently stand to earn more donations from Gittip than from any other source.
Speaking of donations, we'd love to get some help with our ever-growing costs. For example, we recently saw our highest day of traffic ever: 219,109 unique people visited the site, not counting those who set Do Not Track, or those connecting through the API (hello, RES users!). To put that into a financial context, that day alone cost us about $120 in CDN costs. You can help!
Without further ado, however, here are today's reports. Interesting reports are shown in bold.
- 2014-04-01-Analytics-Browser-and-OS.csv
- 2014-04-01-Analytics-Browser-and-OS.pdf
- 2014-04-01-Analytics-Overview.csv
- 2014-04-01-Analytics-Overview.pdf
- 2014-04-01-Analytics-Referral-Traffic.csv
- 2014-04-01-Analytics-Referral-Traffic.pdf
- 2014-04-01-Financial-summary.md
A copy of the financial report is shown here:
In the month of March, the following expenses were accrued:
- Hosting: $199.00
- CloudFront: $235.45
Total USD: $434.45
The following revenue was generated:
- Donations:
- Coinbase: 0.00 BTC
- Dwolla; $0
- Flattr: $0
The operating profit for Feburary is $-434.45
Cumulatively, over the lifetime of MediaCrush, the operating profit is $-2664.26.
Thanks for using MediaCrush, and here's to another million!