"Succeeding" with Maps

Long time readers of this blog will remember that back in July last year I got my mapping software working with Ordnance Survey's OpenSpace server and so our mapping site map.the-hug.net now uses OpenSpace.

They've been hassling me today about how many tiles we've been using. The last time they did this back in March we were averaging about 100-120 visitors a day. I wasn't expecting much of a change but a quick glance at our Piwik stats after their email today suggested we were now seeing more like 200 and the longer term figures show this is no short term trend.

Visits per Month

That looks to me like it's in danger of going exponential. Here's the more recent weekly figures for comparison.

Visits per Week

You can see there's a small decline leading up to Christmas where, as you might expect, people's minds are on other things, but otherwise it just keeps on rising¹.

So what's the problem you're probably asking yourself? Surely Paul should be quietly patting himself on the back? Or, if you're still living the Web 2.0 dream, you're probably asking yourself how we're going to monetise² it?

Well, the first problem is that we get our tiles from Ordnance Survey under their OpenSpace agreement for free. We nominally get 65,000 tiles a days before they start serving tiles like the one on the right.

In practice we get 100,000 tiles but either way it's increasingly becoming an issue as our users hit the 100,000 limit earlier and earlier in the evening.

Given the way those visitor statistics are going this is only going to get worse and there are things afoot elsewhere which I can't go into at the moment which I suspect will result in yet more users coming over to our site.

The problem of course is that they all want something for nothing so buying more tile capacity from Ordnance Survey is not really an option as our users aren't going to pay to use the site. It's not helped by Ordnance Survey themselves now having a web app which apparently does something similar (if you have Silverlight installed), as do Bing, as do various other people who've written OpenSpace applications. These are all free.

But in any case even if they weren't free you can't charge users for access to the maps under the terms of the OpenSpace licence anyway so we would have to generate enough income to cover Ordnance Survey's full commercial rates, whatever they are this week (they're a bit of a moving target) and I can see it ending up with the only people who're actually profiting by this are Ordnance Survey. I somehow doubt we would be able to make any significant money from it.

So it's a real cleft stick: if you write an OpenSpace app people like and want to use you effectively drive yourself out of the market because it becomes unusable as the tile limit gets used up rapidly every day.

You can't even restrict it to an app just for you and your friends as that's not allowed either: it has to be open for anyone to use.

I'm coming to the conclusion that we may have to move on, or at least have a second map server to switch to once we've used up our tile limit (which is what some of the other popular sites like Where's the path do).

1. That blip in March was where we were mentioned on the UK Rivers Guidebook forum so got lightly slashdotted.
2. Shoot me now: I just used "monetise" in a sentence.