File sharing site, 4shared believes it will outgrow competitors like Dropbox and Google Drive to eventually lead the market.
In an interview with ITWeb, Anna Anisin, 4shared's VP of US operations and CEO of 4sync, said 4shared has the second-largest market presence and audience base.
“According to Google Analytics and Alexa [Web metrics provider], 4shared has the second-largest userbase in the cloud market today - Google Drive is number one.
“Dropbox and Google both have storing brand presence in the US and Europe; 4shared is just starting to market to those places, and I have no doubt that we'll catch up rather quickly,” she said.
Anisin also revealed that 4shared has over 100 million active registered accounts and over 200 million unique monthly users - more than Dropbox and Box.net combined.
“We will be bigger than Google because we offer better user benefits, broader platform selection and we don't access user data.”
Describing 4shared, Anisin says it is a virtual drive for storing digital content. With 4shared, she explains, users can upload, store and download music, videos, photographs and many others types of files and documents.
To access 4shared, users create an account online at 4shared.com. When they sign up, they get 15GB of free storage space. Cloud storage services, like Box.net, Dropbox and Google Drive, provide up to 5GB of free cloud space. Also, 4shared premium users can expand their cloud space to 100GB.
According to Anisin, 4shared is also gearing up to release 4sync, a downloadable/browser-based app that allows users to access their files anywhere, on any device, like Linux, Windows, Mac or mobile.
“4shared offers premium pricing, which starts at a free 30-day trial and $6.50 per month (when you sign up for a year), which grants you 100GB of storage space and allows you to upload files as big as 5GB. We are also exploring the possibilities of expanding the size of our premium accounts this fall to accommodate heavy music and video users,” says Anisin.
She also claims that 4shared was one of the first adopters of link sharing. “4shared generates its own links for your entire account, specific folders and individual files, depending on how much you want to share with your friends and family.
“You can also create your own sub-domain, such as anna.4shared.com, for sharing content, if the link you want is available,” she adds.
4shared mobile apps are available on iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian devices. 4shared desktop is available on iOS, Windows and Symbian operating systems.
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