Blingee, the sparkly image editing site, will not be shutting down after all
The image editing site Blingee, which announced late last week that it’d be shutting down on August 25th, will live to sparkle another day.
This morning the site’s team announced on its forum that they would not only be keeping the site up, but also spending the next month “moving Blingee.com to a more forward-looking and streamlined infrastructure to ensure its future.” After announcing the planned shutdown, the Blingee team apparently “secure[d] the resources” necessary to continue running the site.
The reversal follows an outpouring of dismay both on Blingee and elsewhere after last week’s announcement that the site would shut down because it was no longer profitable.
Blingee community members took to the forum to express their joy following the news that the site would remain live. One immediate response, typifying most so far, read, “YABBA-DABBA-DOOOO!! This is EXCELLENT news!! Can’t Wait to share this!!”
The service is owned and run by Picadelic, a company that also operates a video editing app called FxGuru. Michael Karp, Picadelic’s co-founder, said that the decision to keep Blingee online was made after the site’s operations team realized that moving Blingee to a more modern web architecture that Picadelic already uses elsewhere would “lower operating costs to the point where [Picadelic] feel like it’ll be sustainable going forward.”
The reappraisal took place following the community’s outcry, as well as new business opportunities that presented themselves after the announcement the site would close.
“We foresaw the community being passionate, I mean we’ve been close with our community for so long, ” Karp told Fusion, “but we also had a lot of feedback, a lot of interest from new partners, from interested acquirers. It sort of made us relook at exactly what resources we had, and reallocate them from other projects.”
The site previously faced declining ad revenue and traffic, and Karp said that it hadn’t been profitable for at least a year at present operating costs, and said that “it was not a casual decision to shut it down.” But now Picadelic has “decided to kind of invest back into Blingee, and see how we go.”
Aside from the end of the site, many were concerned over the lack of any plan to archive the Blingees on the site. Archive Team, who previously helped preserve large parts of the now-defunct GeoCities service, even began archiving Blingees. The current plan, Karp says, is to move the entire Blingee archive, which he estimated is more than a billion image files (each Blingee is saved in multiple formats and sizes), to the revamped site. He added, however, that the priority is “to make sure the experience of Blingee remains the same for everybody.”
Ethan Chiel is a reporter for Fusion, writing mostly about the internet and technology. You can (and should) email him at [email protected]