Imgur launches video
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Can I advertise on imgur?
Hell no! This is a free site (as in beer) and there will never be any ads on it unless I end up selling out for a million dollars.
> unless I end up selling out for a million dollars
Even better, he sold out for $40 million.
What would e.g. a "pro" subscription for an image hosting site look like, without restricting the basic functionality (upload images hassle-free, without an account, and hotlink them anywhere)?
I'm currently test driving https://www.imagesocket.com (for personal photos) if anybody else is looking for a viable alternative.
But the service is still superior to other competitors, still way better than the two you cite.
right now, i'm still able to authenticate at old.reddit.com... but once they've deprecated that as well, i'll no longer be able to authenticate unless i change my password in this grace period. not doing that though
Wonder how much before enough money is enough money.
- Create a great image hosting website
- Decide to monetize it
- Add advertising
- Stop allowing hotlinking
- Add more advertising
- Add social tools like comments, voting - attempt build a community to look at your ads
[1] https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli...
Early bird gets the internet points, I guess...
I know video isn't trivial, but if you're going for it, might as well go big. There are lots of YouTube creators that have been demonetized and are resented at them. It seems like a great opportunity to start capturing little pieces of that huge pie. Almost every YT creator that I follow has been hit with a few copyright strikes, most of them are not even fighting back anymore. Why not offer those «selected» videos a new home? For them, even if on Imgur they earn $1 dollar, it's $1 dollar they are not seeing from YouTube.
With some luck they can start to get some niche YouTubers, and after that, a few years later you have a full YT competitor.
Sadly, what we get is 30 second max limit, maybe good enough to be another Vine.
What makes you think any youtube competitor would have better luck convincing advertisers to run ads against the same content youtube has demonetized?
Only for people in the US. That essentially means you lose out on 90% of the world market.
The best way for a platform to monetize videos is ad-tech. And nobody is better at ad-tech than google.
But who decides what is offensive? Are videos about gun safety "offensive"? Until recently the answer for that would have been "no", but not so any more.
The terms for what is considered "acceptable" is getting smaller and smaller all the time, people get less exposure to things which challenges their views, making them even more likely to be "offended" by even more harmless stuff, even facts.
If you look for right-wing channels, anti-religious channels (which includes criticism of Islam!) or worse, anti-feminist channels (you know, people who would rather have equality over specially honed women's-rights) which has been demonetized by YouTube, you will find they have been hit across the board.
If you however look for left-wing, pro-immigrant or feminist channels... I challenge you to find a single one which has been banned or demonetized for being "offensive". These views are for some reason not affected by this increasingly narrow definition of what is "acceptable", despite many of them being openly sexist and racist.
With certain platforms completely dominating the market (like Facebook & YouTube), having non-leftists either banned or treated as second-class citizens can be considered quite undemocratic.
People who previously could engage in a reasonable debate in a diverse environment (as in diversity of thought, not some token superficial "diversity" in forms of race or sex) are now being excluded, pushed out, into what certainly will be non-diverse echo-chambers.
What the long-term effects of such actions are can be hard to predict, but I doubt they will be good.
Catering to legal but "demonetized" content won't land you in jail at least, but probably still isn't a great business decision. YouTube already allows advertisers to advertise on most risky inventory (aka "demonetized" videos), they just rarely do so. It's unlikely that advertisers will want to pay more for the same category of video just because it's on a different platform. A startup that chooses to adopt this approach is going to have a hard time attracting creators since they'll have an equal or (most likely) worse monetization narrative than YouTube for that class of content.
IMO a business that wants to enter the online video market would be best served by focusing on product differentiation. This is probably why imgur is trying to do some interesting experimentation with gif-like restrictions.
You mean like all the demonetized gun safety videos?
Your biggest mistake here is assuming that Google only demonetized things which are offensive, questionable or illegal. Most demonetized channels carry no such things.
Their biggest problem is usually that they are not "on board" with the ideologies currently pushed by the radical political left.
I understand that’s the intention, but is that actually the end result?
I feel like the de-monetization went way overboard, most likely because it’s either monkeys or a shitty algorithm like the one for identifying copyright infringement on audio or prioritising clickbait in “recommended” videos.
As a result I do believe there is a possibility for a site to offer a better space both for creators and advertisers, where the monetization criteria is defined by humans (possibly even the video’s creator, under threat of deleting their channel if they intentionally mislabel it - instead of monkeys or stupid algorithms).
They don't disclose their separate financials so no-one not related to Alphabet knows for sure.
After more than a decade of investment, youtube only recently started becoming profitable. So even if a company has the money and the technical chops to start a youtube competition, they really need to think twice before going through this much trouble.
You're right.
Maybe Netflix is well placed because they already have the ISP relationships and CDN set up, if they can figure a way to leverage that for user uploaded content? I doubt they're interested though.
What changed? Compression got better, but it doesn't feel like bandwidth got cheaper. Is it all just because it's easier to spin up a video hosting infrastructure on some cloud stack?
You could put ads on that just as easily, but it'd be a huge dick move if the ads had sound.
I’m pretty sure this move might kill Imgur, not that they had a business to begin with. Reddit already switched to an in house S3 bucket and CDN for UGC uploads a while ago, content will either age out with attrition or be backfilled by users.
Imgur is going to be quite the ArchiveTeam project.
I used to work somewhere that banned radio streaming sites, until the local ISP became willing to upgrade the connection.
But the real upside is that your uploads will live along with your reddit post. Amazing how reddit becomes a dead-link factory when you go back just one year.
> dig v.redd.it +short
reddit.map.fastly.net.
151.101.17.140It also has the caveat that if you want to share it with someone you have to send them a link to the reddit comment thread, which is not always desired or appropriate.
I think the black box just means that the first frame is black
I wonder if they're trying to serve WebM or some other unsupported codec to iOS devices by accident, but I'd think that would have some kind of error indication instead of a black box.
But I'm with you 100%, their video and image hosting is super slow, and needs to be paused/unpaused a few times before loading or playing anything.
Isn't video advertising mostly handled at a higher layer by sticking some segments into the playlist/container rather than actually encoding it into a single video unit anyway?
Finally, you can't add a link. I guess it's still useful for brand advertising, but I suspect that's less valuable than the kind where you can directly track conversions.
Are you aware of the CPU overhead and lag time involved with just "splicing in some additional frames" to a video file within the context of an HTTP request cycle?
I'd hope there would be some opportunity for caching to make it a bit cheaper than every single request, but maybe with dynamic targeted or real-time ad bidding that wouldn't work so well.
There’s a couple of similar Mechanical Turk micro-task vendors but they’re selective about who they partner with.
Another reason, stuff is clustered close together now. Exampels being the datacenters in Hillsboro OR and Ashburn VA.
I think anybody who was involved in video from 2005 onwards knew this would eventually happen, but this really came to fruition in the past 5 years.
Doing video on a third party cloud environment would be prohibitively expensive.
- robust transcoding that is reasonably fast, into a multitude of different formats to accommodate web and mobile (example problem: do you support vertical videos)
- a good CDN at the best cost you can. videos need to start almost immediately
- ability to snap thumbnails and other artifacts
- lots of storage
- a fast single page app
- content controls (because a lot of people upload porn)
- a good extensible player that supports fullscreen and VAST ads and whatever else
- a robust uploader that can reliably handle large chunked uploads
I remember a quote from Chad Hurley where he said the reason YouTube succeeded was because unlike its competitors, who were all offering similar services, it didn’t suck. Given this laundry list of must-haves, you can see why it was so easy to suck.
I own an ISP and about 2 years ago, we got first GGC node (basically youtube CDN), they are provided free by Google to ISPs as long as you are willing to host it at your own expense and you meet a certain bandwidth requirement, I think it was 1gbps youtube traffic at that time. Anyways they send us free 3 fully stacked Dell R720, shipped it us from another country. To the best of my knowledge, each of them cost 5kUSD. Total throughout after saturating ~30 Gbps, we will be given 3 more of these. In our country, to the best of my knowledge, there are 40 ISPs who have these nodes. A least 5 of them have 2 full racks worth of these servers - all free paid for by Youtube/Google.
This is just one country. Investment still remains an insane task for video hosting.
hopefully we aren't the only ones being annoyed by this, if those badges are effective they aren't going away any time soon.
Everyone is annoyed, but many of those who are annoyed will just follow the instructions and increase the metric of whoever wanted those .
Good god, no I don't want a medium account and will not want a medium account thank you.
That popup is a monstrosity.
I get irrationally angry at that highlighting. BTW ublock origin might be able to block the popup, if you right click -> block element
I've been too lazy to block the popup, but I think I will next time it appears.
Please check out my [1]filterlist project for uBlock Origin, you may find it useful.
Nobody will pay for it, and people are ignoring ads more and more (not to mention that too much intrusive ads, like video ads will drive some people away completely).
https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6487324/youtube-...
I'd pay for it if I was given the option.
I like imgur's service. I want to use it for the things I do and would like them to keep being a quick image host. If that means paying annually so I can keep my API key working the way it does and not having my experience ruined by increasingly intrusive advertising I absolutely would throw money their way.
There isn't "nobody" out there not willing to invest in their entertainment. I'm sure we're a minority but we're not "nobody".
Competitors like CloudApp or Droplr do image/video hosting much better.
That easy huh
$1/year is manageable by just about everyone, and with 250M users (or 1B+ users in the case of WhatsApp), that’s a nice yearly haul.