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Comment by cloudwalking | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, bandwidth isn't free. Imgur can't serve hotlinked content for free, forever.

Which is what drives the circle of life for image hosts.

"Man, all the image hosts suck ass and get in the way of me just seeing the damned image. I'm gonna create a new one, without all the cruft!"

"This image host is going well, but the bills are killing me. We'll have to add ads, but obviously only where they're unobtrusive."

"We're still bleeding cash, but we've got a huge userbase. We need to monetize it better. We'll toss in a couple interstitials to drive up ARPU."

"Man, all the image hosts suck ass and get in the way of me just seeing the damned image. I'm gonna create a new one, without all the cruft!"

I don't think that's it, quite exactly. I think it's more that when people see stats for lots of eyeballs they too often think "if we monetize those to the max, think of the money we could make" and then that shifts into thinking they're leaving money on the table.

The thing is, while there is huge demand for image hosting sites, that demand is really low "quality". After all, we're talking about sites hosting memes and screenshots from games, not original works of art created after tens and hundreds of hours of laboring in Photoshop.

All the pictures of text too, just because text posts on Reddit don't earn karma

And to get around the 140 character limit on Twitter. Though admittedly, most of those are on twimg rather than imgur.

Yeah. https://sli.mg seems to be the new imgur. I wonder how long until they start going downhill.

I like their moderation log though, that's a good step.

sli.mg is the new imgur for /r/the_donald, and other subs whose content imgur regularly censors. I haven't really seen it used "in the wild" on more mainstream subs. It does have a nice, clean and minimalistic interface, similar to what imgur used to have.

How bad are they that they're getting censored off imgur? What for, racial hatred?

imgur CEO: https://i.imgur.com/D2j9SlH.jpg

Please don't do this here.

It's like on Facebook - if something gets reported enough times on imgur it get's auto-censored until it maybe is manually restored by a imgur employee.

Because of that a lot of relatively benign Trump content gets censored on imgur because a lot of people find even his name to be offensive. Some even think his name is violence.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/24/emory-unive...

Not racial hatred, images of Robert Byrd kissing Hillary Clinton will get censored. Basically anything that is a joke at the expense of Hillary Clinton will get removed.

It was started in response to censorship of fatpeoplehate content.

Here's the AMA

https://reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/4erynj/we_are_slimg...

Funny, so limited it's good

https://sli.mg/lrrDOF #testt

Somehow I was surprised to see slimgur here. No accompanying reference to https://voat.co? :)

To be fair, they could have operated a simple and effectively profitable business, and grown at an economically normal rate. But hey, I guess I wouldn't say no to $40M of a16z's money and a $200M valuation either.

I assume your familiar with their operating costs somehow? I have direct experience at a different (older) host. It was simply not possible to serve the tremendous bandwidth needs without increasingly aggressive monetization. I have no idea what they're costs look like and bandwidth is much cheaper than it was 10 years ago, but I'd wager that there was no profitable business for them at any point without intrusive ads.

> but I'd wager that there was no profitable business for them at any point without intrusive ads.

5 years ago: "but it's profitable enough to hopefully hire another guy or two this summer."[0]

The founder has completely bootstrapped the site since day 1, and has done an AMA on Reddit talking about the whole situation[1]. Ads are absolutely necessary to make it profitable, but clearly taking investment now means they are going to squeeze every ounce of dollar out of the site and hence the sentiment of "aggressive monetization".

[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/eicjf/im_the_imgur_gu...

[1] - https://www.quora.com/How-profitable-is-Imgur-com

That was five years ago, they've experienced explosive growth since then which changes the equation. Because they were profitable then doesn't mean that you can simply linearly grow that as the amount of content being served grows. Particularly when you rely on ad revenue which has been on a downward trend over the last few years.

Point being: unless you have been directly involved in the decisions accusing them of either malevolence or greed is a pretty tough accusation to make. Sometimes (usually) it's cold hard business realities that drive people to adopting these sorts of monetization strategies.

So now the cycle will repeat. Someone will start a host that simply serves images. People will use it. They'll add some ads, people won't care much. They'll start serving more aggressive ads and someone will start another host... over and over again.

>To be fair, they could have operated a simple and effectively profitable business

How? I don't see a way from Imgur to monetize on sharing images directly.

Datamining. What FB is doing. Sell the info.

Data mining what exactly? Unless you know what in the image, it's hardly interesting that a user with browser fingerprint X viewed some image with a random hash or name.

Sure it is, you can track the site it was hosted on and follow the fingerprint around the web. The image content isn't the juicy bit.

If I can see you viewed an image referred from /r/woodwork I might offer you some woodworking tools and drive up the conversation rate of my advertisements.

> The image content isn't the juicy bit

It is. The wealth of images alone, the sheer amount, from memes to vacation pics is worth so much now that image recognition is taking off.

I was perhaps too dismissive, it is certainly full of information. But I mostly meant for the moment the information most likely to be gleaned will be from referral links.

That's literally what they did for years until taking a16z's money...

They did it by building a community around the non-reddit related traffic. Basically redditor's would share imgur links outside the reddit ecosystem (Facebook etc), then other people would visit imgur directly instead of going through reddit. These secondary users are monetizable.

Imgur had to eat the costs of supporting reddit's hotlinking (though not all reddit posts are hotlinked) but that was more or less imgur's "marketing budget."

That's a reason for a pattern, not a dark pattern, though.

As someone who spends millions of dollars on targeted advertising, I can safely say Imgur and similar sites have no worthwhile targeting options unless Facebook buys them.

Then they should never have started. Why does every 'free' service on the Internet inevitably devolve into an ad-laden, tracker-enabled shitfest?

Because they probably aren't charities, and can't afford to donat e Free resources for your perpetual enjoyment?

Then we're back to my initial point: they never should have started as one.

I imagine you in a grocery store somewhere, railing against free samples. "You never should've given me a piece of sausage if you were going to start charging for them."

That is possibly the worst analogy I've ever read on HN.

Only if you speak Dutch.

Not comparable since supermarket in-store free samples are tiny servings of a product you can purchase in the same establishment.

Supermarkets wouldn't allow, much less encourage, anyone to consume large numbers of free samples instead of buying the actual for-sale product.

You're wrong. It would be awful to live somewhere where you get to choose which companies are allowed to start.

The problem is that these sites start out as a small, useful service and then some VC with dollar signs in their eyes throws a few million dollars at them. The clothes make the primate, and suddenly what was three guys in a back room living on instant noodles feels obliged to "act like the million-dollar company that they are."

> Because they probably aren't charities, and can't afford to donat e Free resources for your perpetual enjoyment?

Then why did they start a free service to begin with, if they knew from the start it couldn't last?

Right, to trick people into becoming dependent on the free service so they'll be reluctant to leave once the shady, UX-degrading monetization starts.

You'll forgive me if I'm not sympathetic to that business plan.

Back to reality: would imgur have become so popular if it wasn't free? Who would pay? Reddit users? I don't think so.

You seem to be asserting that anything is okay as long as it makes money.

Nobody has to make a website. If the only way you can think of to make money is bait-and-switch, then you can choose to do that, or you can choose to go back to the drawing board and come up with a less unpleasant business plan. If you choose the former, don't expect me to cheer because you found a way to make money, and you think that's the only thing that matters.

I agree with you. When imgur started there was a definite need. Now it's being replaced because there's a new need (caused by imgur changing the way it operates).

Also, I don't think you're going to make everyone happy as a business, and that's (probably) okay.

+1 to this. People should stop being soften with unrealistic business that uses the ad hororem tactic. Imgur can explore dozens of models.

I think you're forgetting that we live in a world of capitalism. Nobody promised no one nothing. Owners and share holders decide a business model and it's up to you, the consumer, to decide whether you go with it or not. There's always alternatives, if a service seems bad to you, choose a different one, but don't blame the owners for not choosing a business model that would suit you personally.

Shame on imgur for providing a service that was sought-after by everyone, and provide it for free by serving ads.

While we're at it, let's demand the end of free TV, free email providers, free forums, and even youtube.

> While we're at it, let's demand the end of free TV, free email providers, free forums, and even youtube.

If you have a sustainable business model for such a thing, knock yourself out.

If you're just making it free for a couple of years to suck people in before you ratchet up the (not necessarily monetary) cost then yeah, we can do without that.

I think the problem with this particular web service area is that you can set up an image sharing site easily and for little cost. But when it gets popular, and there's a shift to higher bandwidth usage, then costs mount beyond the ability of most people to sustain it. If it's popular then it's going to get acquired or have investors who will push the site to be more commercial; the only other way to go is to close the site or perhaps beg for donations.

> to suck people in before you ratchet up

It's an image hosting service.

You upload cat pictures, you pass the link around. That's it.

Once the hosting service stops being a hosting service, you move on and upload the picture somewhere else.

It's far more reasonable to think there are other explanations than what effectively comes across as very negative intent from the beginning.

For example, they may have hoped or believed they could find a better business model over time, an alternative to the traditional ad models. Based on watching their various experiments since the day they got started, I can say for a fact they did try other things (two examples: Imgur as a service via paid API and Imgur Pro accounts).

Is it more likely the Imgur founder was naive or malevolent? The answer is extremely obvious.

They still provide a 'free to the user at point of use' service. The service they provide doesn't include hotlinking by other site hosts, that's been normal since about 2000 IIRC.

The service they provided DID include hotlinking from other sites, which was one of their major distinguishing features and which is why I (for one) used them almost exclusively as an image host.

I can be sympathetic to the fact that their previous 'business model' wasn't financially viable while still being annoyed that they've changed it.

unfortunately nothing is free in this world

A lot of sites/services start for a laugh, and/or because the people who start it assume/hope there'll be some way of making money from it when it gets popular. For a few, this is true. Some go dark, some give up, some sell up. It's up to them I guess.

Counter-argument: Wikipedia.

that's fine. nobody is demanding their services now including Reddit.

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