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Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

Imgur forgot its roots as a dumb image host, rapidly crufting-up its service with things that were not only annoying but interfering with its basic function. If you can’t easily see an image as soon as you click on it — on mobile or otherwise — then the image service has completely failed.

The sad thing is, they could have added non-intrusive ads. DaringFireball does it; write a single line of text such as “This image brought to you by FooBar, Inc.” and SHOW THE LINKED IMAGE. No pop-ups, no tricks, no obscurity; ad+image, done.

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"Daring Fireball does it" has to be the worst possible comparison imaginable. Gruber has super differentiated, high editorial value content that folks will pay a premium to put their message next to. Imgur is about as far away from that as possible. They have to try to make money, it's crazy to sit here and think you know better than they do on this. Don't you think if they could make enough money doing what you think, they would do that instead? They are in a tough industry. They host images (relatively expensive), they have almost no user information for targeting, most visitors never come back to a page again, and most of the content posted is super low value. Unfortunately, this is the result.

I wish an image service existed that did some image recognition on the picture and provided you with relevant, but subtle 'Learn more about this thing' links.

Oh yes. I run a image hosting service and adsense cant serve any relevant ads because the page hardly contains any text. The only text they identify is 'image hosting' and start serving ads to competitors T_T. My service has more information about user interest though based on topics and other user interactions etc but there is no way to forward these hints to adsense :(

Any tips on ad providers that support more explicit choice of topic per page load?

Or even links sending you to the original source of the image (comics especially)

Hey, yes! If reverse image search is possible now, it should be easy to automatically give credit to original creators, connect them with audiences and bypass blogspam!

How would you determine which reverse image search result is the original content creator? Just curious.

Finding the oldest image would probably work for most cases, as long as you found every instance of the image on the internet.

It might work ok for some of the larger comics/image producers.

I was referring to the way that DaringFireball does ads. I was not talking about any other aspect of DaringFireball.

If Imgur wants ads, there is a way to make ads sane and still make money.

For what anecdotes are worth, DaringFireball’s method is about the only form of ads that has ever worked on me. I actually read what he says about these companies, and I often am curious enough to go learn more. And he’s charging a lot for these ad placements for a week.

Whereas, I have never, ever been interested in something that tried to use trickery to pop up in my face, play audio, play animations, steal my clicks or otherwise force me to acknowledge its existence before continuing. I can’t even remember what those products were; I can only remember the speed at which I searched for a black "X" button to close the things.

The way that Daring Fireball does ads is a product of the entire way that Gruber runs the site - you can't only talk about ads. Not to mention the point that Gruber can do whatever he wants with his site and does not need to maximize revenue or provide a venture-scale return. He certainly makes a lot of money with ads the way they're set up - he could certainly make more with "better" ads. He deserves a lot of credit for valuing his readers so highly.

Can you point to a single Imgur-like property using the sort of ads you cite to generate any kind of significant revenue to the point where they could possibly offer a return on venture cash? I don't know of a single major web property running that style of ads that does so successfully. In fact, we see progressively worse ads are what publications are choosing to run instead (looking at you WaPo, running inline "videos" on mobile that are really huge GIFs). I agree that it sucks - certainly no argument there. But I am unaware of anywhere where what you're suggesting is working competitively with unobtrusive options.

I just want to chime in with a simpler answer. That's not really how Internet ads work. Ad deals between companies are fairly large and complex, at least the kind that are going to support a site like imgur.

Content is king and imgurs content is random and most likely junk. There's no consistency you could sell to a partner where'd they be willing to pay enough to allow something like DaringFireball does to work. The only way they're making enough is to put the junk we're dealing with now.

>If Imgur wants ads, there is a way to make ads sane and still make money.

There is also "a way" to win at the Olympics.

A lifetime of dedication and training?

I've never seen Grubers blog until today... Does he only mention the sponsor at the beginning and end of each week?

I don't see any other occurrence of the sponsors name.

If you Google 'DF Sponsorship' you can get all the info (&rates). I believe a weekly sponsorship is about $13k and he does $15k-20k per podcast across 3-4 ad reads.

It's 9K. I really wish you'd Google'd that yourself. I have no idea about the podcasts.

Here's the link for reference: https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/

There are ads from The Deck (which is a semi exclusive advertising network) on the sidebar.

> Gruber has super differentiated, high editorial value content

Oh, you mean: "Apple products are the best! Google sucks!"

Yes, high quality content indeed...

Gruber has done more to get high-level Apple people talking publicly answering unscripted questions than maybe anyone else in the media. Read him, learn from him, and like him or not, that's up to you, but at least respect what the guy has done.

Sorry, but it is just a fanboy blog for fanboys.

The only thing I give him credit for is markdown. That is a very good contribution, but I really don't have to read his "blog".

> Imgur forgot its roots as a dumb image host, rapidly crufting-up its service with things that were not only annoying but interfering with its basic function.

Imgur is my main form on entertainment and the app currently lives on my homescreen. Mindless fun and good vibes unlike reddit which makes me angry/sad/depressed.

Imgur would have been dead with this Reddit move if they had not evolved, they obviously saw it coming. Building an image hosting site is not hard; building a fun community is. And Imgur did a great job with it. I love imgur.

I know there is some kind of community on Imgur, but I wonder what percent of it (or the content it enjoys) only exists because it was the unofficial image host for Reddit.

Once Reddit is largely gone, will the community survive?

Yes, absolutely; the Imgur community is completely and totally distinct from Reddit (to the point where people bitch about even seeing the reddit stuff! There's even the comment-meme 'roddit pls' etc)

The big question is simply how Imgur will continue to (sustainably) grow that community. This really brings the question back to the very root: "How do we make Imgur the de-facto image hosting/sharing site in the world"

They bitch about the obvious reddit stuff, but do they realize that most of their content comes from reddit? What happens when most of their posts disappear?

I wish I had an actual statistic, but it's definitely not most. It is quite a large, active community, and they seem to vastly prefer content submitted directly to imgur. I would expect that few will even notice a difference, honestly.

Imgur has its own community. By now you can't even tell if something is posted on imgur and someone submits it on reddit or if a reddit user uploads something and it gets upvotes on imgur.

I think that imgur can exist on its own and will have more than enough content.

> Mindless fun and good vibes

And then, sadly, the periodic misogyny-denial post, anti-feminist circle jerk that usually originates on Reddit but then enough people in the Imgur community upvote. This exact thing has made me decide to stop even looking at Imgur. :/

I'm currently working on a competitive image hosting project with a feature called SafeSpace. Just configure your profile with your various triggers and enjoy safe browsing!

More details soon...

I really hope you're joking.

Imgur had to pay its investors by shitting up its service.

Imgur would have been dead because they were running out of money.

So why did they terminate my recurring paypal subscription? I got an email saying "Hey, we don't need your money anymore!" and after that their service went downhill fast.

That's interesting I didn't know that, have you any figures to hand?

Imgur was able to pivot from a simple image hosting service to a standalone community. Many people browse imgur every day without ever having visited reddit. That's no small feat, and definitely much easier to monetize than dumb image host.

> Many people browse imgur every day without ever having visited reddit

I didn't even know you could do that. Last time I went to the site directly (years ago) I recollect all you could do was upload an image or browse random images.

You can search by tag (and anyone can add tags).

You can now browse entire subreddits.

>Imgur forgot its roots as a dumb image host

I think they are just the most recent organization to figure out that there's no viable standalone business model in "dumb image host".

Which is, unfortunately, what users need. I wonder if we're doomed to have a new "dumb image host" every few years or if someone will someday figure out how to make a sustainable business out of delivering value in this space, without having to clutter the site with crap.

I think it would have to be a larger organization that has other revenue sources and provides the image hosting as a loss leader. Someone where the bandwidth costs are a drop in the bucket, local edge caches already exist, etc. Netflix, Cloudflare, Akamai, Amazon, Google, etc.

There were several other such services that learnt it the hard way, back the when MySpace was the big thing and decided to host their images themselves (and video too). One such service survived in those days (Google bought Youtube), the others died.

Another narrative is that Imgur got tired of its roots and created their own community, that for some people was better than Reddit in more or less any conceivable way.

The mobile experience was horrible. They were doing some weird scrolling thing where it would really mess up my viewport.

Yeah, and when you have multiple images the zoom/expand thing is maddening because it can be super hard to figure out how to unzoom to scroll and see the next image.

Now they're getting those horrifying autoforward fake-virus-scan vibrating ads.

The mobile experience needs a lot of tlc.

> The mobile experience was horrible.

that's promoting the app installe :(

There's a difference between serveing mostly text content and mostly image content. Just the difference in bandwidth/server cost makes this a bad comparison.

imgur didn't forget its roots, its roots were a marketing ploy to win Reddit's trust before dialing up monetization.

imgur got popular because it originally eschewed the bloated ad-laden crapware that paid the bills of the previous imagehosts, until the runway ran out and imgur took its turn in the cycle.

DaringFireball does it;

John Gruber needs to feed and house himself, his wife, and his kids. I'm just guessing here, knowing nothing about the internal workings of the company, but I'm pretty sure Imgur has a few more mouths to feed than a single founder's immediate family.

I think you're severely underestimating the success of Imgur. It has essentially become an image-based Reddit clone, with its own thriving community of users who never leave the site.

It's no longer just a place for Redditors to dump their images. And it's a good thing too, because this probably would've killed them if they hadn't gone that direction.

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