Why Zippyshare is shutting down and what to do

Zippyshare, one of the most popular free file-sharing platforms is shutting down because of the decline in ad revenue and competition

Zippyshare Shutdown

In a statement released on March 19, 2023, Zippyshare announced that is shutting down its services on March 31, 2023, because of the decline in ad revenue, competition, and rise in electricity prices.  Zippyshare says that the increase of ad blockers built into the browser has led to a significant loss of their main source of revenue.

Most publishers who depend on ad revenue to run their websites are facing the same challenge that has contributed to the shutdown of Zippyshare. Site visitors want to enjoy free services and content without ads but do not want to understand that the website they use exists because of ads. The alternative to ads would be subscriptions but the internet will be useless if every website decides to switch to subscriptions.

Zippyshare users are considering opening a Gofund or crowd-fund to try to keep the website alive. However, Zippyshare has not indicated that it is open to donations.

Competition

When it comes to competition, Zippyshare has itself to blame because it has not added any feature, rebranded, or evolved to keep up with the competition since it was established in 2006. Zippyshare could have been the Dropbox of today.

Lessons Learnt

Every tech company should learn a lesson from Zippyshare collapse that once a website starts receiving a sizable amount of traffic, it should transition from being 100% ad revenue supported and look for other revenue-generating means. Good business models of profitable freemium web applications to learn from include Canva, Dropbox, and Hootsuite.

Zippyshare Alternatives

The best Zippyshare alternative that you might want to give a try is MediaFire, Google Drive, or Catbox.