Ask HN: Why all these funding of filesharings sites?

No. Not thinking the same.<p>File-sharing is more of a usability problem. Invention of email + attachments solved file sharing a long time ago. Its the integration with your everyday life that has been a challenge up till now and this is what Dropbox and iCloud are solving.<p>Companies like YouSendIt never became as successful as Dropbox because they were before their time; and when the time came, they failed to innovate instead hoping for people to adapt as they adopt. Except I don't think they did it right.<p>You don't want to pay for file sharing as a feature; but it'll be part of the infrastructure that runs your life. Its synonymous to when Bill Gates' separated the software and hardware and focused on software. No customer wanted to pay for it; but the companies that made the hardware (IBM, Apple) did want to pay for it.<p>What does it mean to "solving a problem"?? Every attempt at a startup has and solves some kind of problem.

I'm not sure what you mean about 'all this funding for file sharing sites', but I haven't been following the sector closely.<p>What you will often find is a gang mentality within sectors. Investors won't get in on one-deal, but they may think the sector is going to experience huge growth, so they invest in the next best company. We saw it with Foursquare, gowalla, etc.etc, as well as groupon, livingsocial...<p>It seems the distribution is normally a big dog, an also ran, and then everybody else fighting for scraps.<p>With respect to why Dropbox is interesting, it is my understanding that the interesting parts aren't that you as a user can store and share your files. I think the long-term potential is for applications you interact with to access your data through services like dropbox. This could mean that you don't end up paying for it directly, but rather it would be built into the costs of other services you use.<p>Think of it like iCloud, but for all platforms and open to any developer. That's my understanding of where Dropbox is going, but like I said, I don't follow that segment.

At Drew Houston's Startup School talk he mentioned something almost in passing which I think summarizes <i>exactly</i> why every investor wants or should want a piece of the filesharing pie: these systems have the opportunity to become the "filesystem of the internet". In this world of systems such as iOS and Chrome OS where the local filesystem becomes abstracted away, and while internet connections become increasingly ubiquitous, it isn't unreasonable to expect that "uploading" files to a website will really mean linking to a third party where those files are kept and "downloading" files will really mean pointing to the place where you want said third party to keep them. If that were to happen, and there existed a dominant player in the space who wasn't already a Google or a Facebook, they would quickly become one.

The overall market is estimated to be at 10's of billions of dollars in size. No one is even close to being a market leader, although companies like box.net, dropbox, and sharefile have some established customer base. But there is plenty of opportunity for new players to enter and disrupt the market, and investors don't want to miss out on that.<p>Investors already in this space may see investing in other guys like an insurance policy to maximize the chances of one of their portfolio companies making it big. But there are other investors who missed the boat on earlier opportunities and are looking for ways to enter this market through the newcomers.<p>From the perspective of a cofounder in this space - there are many interesting problems that no one has solved yet and there is a lot of potential to innovate, disrupt, and make a difference. At least that's what's driving my passion.<p>Disclaimer: cofounder of TitanFile.

For most investors, it's about making money. Making money by controlling a niche. Each of the funded File Sharing startups that got funded I came across, had these two components:<p>1.) Clear advantage in a specific Niche (for us it was legal compliance, security and tracking - all of it matters a lot to lawyers and auditors).<p>2.) Have a serious (and usually viable) plan to further differentiate.<p>Disclaimer: I am from bellow mentioned TitanFile.

Well far from a small problem in terms of all yc startups thus far I think Dropbox is easily been one of the best problems solved. Sure that was varying method of file backup before it but nothing as straight forward and painless. Many people using Dropbox have never backed up files before and would have been unlikely to invest in previous solutions but Dropbox is just so intuitive that pretty much everyone gets it.

because the trend appears to be (as an outsider) that what matters is not revenue or chance of profit, it's the amount of users a site can acquire. File sharing is easy to do (arguably hard to perfect) and a good file sharing site will get <i>a lot</i> of users. Maybe they're funded in the hopes of a buyout? Dropbox validated the idea that file sharing can get high valuations...