It's hard to pay the bills with ads: PipeBytes charges for file transfers now

Back in November we took a look at a promising new service that lets you send large files to friends or colleagues without using an instant messenger, FTP site, or web parking service like YouSendIt. PipeBytes lets you establish a direct connection with another user. All you do is select a file you want to upload and PipeBytes will give you a code to share with a friend who will be able to download that file directly from your PC.

At launch the service was completely advertising supported. But a funny thing happened when we went to try it again the other night. We noticed our file transfer was going extraordinarily slowly. Like 128Kbps slow.

It turns out PipeByes has decided that playing YouTube videos with advertisements wasn't paying the bills and the service is capping your upload/download speeds unless you pay for faster service. We suppose that's fair enough, and $0.99 for a one day speed pass that bumps your transfer speeds up to 1.5Mbps seems reasonable. But we can't imagine why anyone would pay $19.99 a month when they could set up an FTP server for free.

Our prediction: PipeBytes will either have to increase its 128Kbps cap on free transfers to attract more regular users or the service will ride off into obscurity.

Tags: advertising, commerce, file-transfer, pipebytes