Imgur Acquired by Medialab
imgur.com
imgur.com
I guess the videos are much more high resolution now than the webcam size 320x240 videos back then but has cost gone up that much?
Image file sizes increasing dramatically as smartphones started producing photo sizes that would have been considered massive 15 years ago, saturated much of the gains in cost to hardware.
It's easier to run a one-click image host (like the early Imgur) as a solo operator today versus back then. It's not much cheaper when you account for the larger image files (unless you severely limit the file size, which won't be a popular choice with users, most of which just blast four billion smartphone photos, don't think much about image sizes, and want to upload them as is without thinking about any of that).
The big ad platforms like Facebook and Google have thrived, of course. And as platforms like Snapchat have aged they've gradually improved the rates they're getting for their ad space (a typical process).
The scale of online advertising today isn't because the industry's median or average CPMs went up 100 fold. The volume went up dramatically over the last 10-15 years with the traffic for the big services. The big advertisers brought billion dollar ad budgets online and handed them to Facebook, not to one-click image hosts.
Your typical one-click image host is not going to command better ad rates today vs 15 years ago. It's a worse context than it was back then, actually. Back then advertisers were relatively stupid when it came to online advertising, today they're a lot more sophisticated, and a lot more strict about where they place ads (eg porn on one-click image hosts is a big problem for advertisers). The big, rich platforms like Facebook eat a large share of the high paying advertising. What's left for something like a one-click image host, is very, very low paying ads that you have to run a trillion of to make money.
Ads cost a lot more. People who rent space get a lot less.
That’s quite a difference.
[1]: https://www.fastly.com/pricing/ [2]: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/?nc1=h_ls
Scaleway, OVH will get you that, but at a larger scale just rent bare metal.
The domain is there, but it just says "ImageHost.org is closed" with a Google Analytics tag.
Regularly, on imgur, you see a pic in interest for a celebrity, a rich person, a movie. It looks organic, but if you look closely, there are plenty of weird things about it. Then it disappears as suddenly as it arrived.
I believe that they sell the front page to PR firms that need to promote something in a way the people think themself came up with the hype.
It's probably the same for a lot of communities with a strong influence on trends, like popular sub reddits or hacker news.
There is no better ads than the one you don't see. There is no better slogan than the one you repeat to your friends as a catchphrase. And there is no better propaganda than the one based on ideas you thought you had by yourself.
Besides, such company would do its best to stay discrete, by design.
That wrongly creates the impression that there are only a few HN users engaging with it.
A version of this: https://i.imgur.com/pgXjbNy.gifv
Both sites are quite "nerdy". Each in their own way.
7/7 would recommend
I remember going on the front page of Imgur once a couple of years back and it seemed less entertaining and more rage-baity than now -- think I'll revisit that decision...
It did ok on reddit (100 upvotes) but a few thousands upvotes on Imgur and made the front page with hundreds of thousands of views. I was shocked since I didn't even know that was a thing. But my guess is popular with people who are on their phone a lot, are not as tech saavy, or international.
Make no mistake, Imgur is a social network. It has its own memes, regular posting themes, and users recognised by the community[2].
[1]: They are (were?) proud of that and bragged about it in a page describing themselves.
[2]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/anewbadlyphotoshoppedphotoofm...
Now pay.
Brilliant
I'm signing up.
"Where was I"
Maybe charge $1/month for MVP sarcasm.
Browsing imgz felt like watching a fun movie, I love the architecture too ( ... we dont have this...LOL )
BTW, I am (Maybe I should say WE are) also building a image hosting service. https://host.pics (Pre-Alpha)
Oh Em Eff Gee xD xD xD
You weren't kidding. Amazing.
> If you're expecting professionalism, call Oracle and ask for a quote of Oracle Advanced Image Sharing for Hadoop or whatever crap they sell
If I end up stealing your style for something, I owe you a beer.
Lol! Haven't used the service, but the website is fun.
That architecture.
https://imgz.org/i9hxfgRu-1280.png
Cloudflare Free Caching, T2, the only thing we have and it is not even on AWS.
The plugins and the web-site are also crazy as shit! Take a look:
Love stuff like that. Thanks again for making me smile. I appreciate that.
I seriously doubt their community can sustain the costs of the service. In fact, the quality of imgur's service has declined in an effort to make profit. For instance, all images are compressed now. That used to not be true.
Most platforms you are using today cannot survive without ad's, because their business model is not one that can make a profit without a monopoly first.
i notice youre using cloudflare to deliver the files on the download side, and im guessing you are taking advantage of bandwidth alliance so ingress/egress are basically free - i always thought the biggest cost for something like this would be the storage, eg if you are letting people send unlimited <5GB files for free, and each of those last for 10 days on what im assuming is some kind of object storage/s3-like thing, surely you are paying a fortune in $/GB/month, even if its pro-rated to 1/3 the amount since the files only live 1/3 a month?
First off there is tax compliance, if you want to be global it will cost a lot for accountants and lawyers that understand how this should work "anywhere" in the world.
Second, I know some people that will just cancel credit cards because they don't want to make the next recurring payment for a service. Coming after these people is not worth the effort but hurts the bottom line.
Third, you need to hire employees to look after customer accounts and billing if there are any questions.
I think there's other reasons and I know payment processors like Stripe and Square are attempting to make this seamless, but I'm guessing a single source of funding is still desirable.
Image hosting is relatively cheap, so you can have good margins if you can get a lot of use and fill the ad inventory. The way you do it, is by running as thin of an operation as possible.
When the first wave of one-click image hosts were popping up back in 2004-2005 roughly, I noticed one called ImageVenue. The founder, Vlad, was out of Eastern Europe somewhere. I emailed him and bought advertising, the price was right and he had a lot of impressions to fill. Back then he was just buying tons of $40/month dedicated servers from one specific host, using a img7.imagevenue.com scheme for each machine, and filling up the boxes. You can still use ImageVenue.com 17 years later, even though the traffic for the service has never been what it was during the early peak years (tons of image hosting competition swamped the market). I had a running dialogue with Vlad across about a year, he also mentioned in discussing Ajax (early popularity days for Ajax) use at the time, that he wasn't familiar with it and was "only really good with C++ and PHP". So I assume some of it was built in PHP. He was managing ads in-house, where he handled each sale by email, negotiating impressions and duration each month.
And regarding TwitPic, circa 2010: "TwitPic is generating $1.5 to $2 million in ad sales on an annual basis, with 70% profit margins, says its founder Noah Everett"
Long story long, I basically ended up giving Twitpic to Twitter (I wanted the photos to live on). We were already feeling the squeeze from their own native image feature plus some other compounding events like Google Adsense banning us out-of-the-blue with no recourse that really affected our margins [Hey Google, you still owe us $100k+ ;)].
It was one of the best, most educating times of my life. Just thankful I had that opportunity to run Twitpic for those years, God blessed me.
The End.
P.S. I'm still tinkering https://ark.fm
Disclaimer: Hopefully I'm remembering correctly, it's been a while!
1. https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/CBS/SearchResults?SearchTy...
2. https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-whisper...
3. https://www.assemblyexchange.com/about-us - their job ads feature this ad network prominently.
Pretty much guarantees that these folks will never raise another round from anyone ever again, though.
Way to burn bridges...
Note the re-assignments in mid-2018.
This prompted me to check whether there were any backup efforts already, and how much data that would involve. Indeed, archiveteam has some good info: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur
> Imgur serves a massive amount of traffic. In 2012 alone, 42 petabytes of data were transferred. Fortunately, the amount of images uploaded is much less, albeit still a lot. In 2012, around 300,000,000 images were uploaded; assuming an average size of 120KB, that's 36TB in one year. As of 2014, there were 650 million images with 1.5 million being added each day according to one source. An analysis in 2015 based on extrapolation from a sample of random image IDs estimated about 2 billion images with a total raw full-resolution image size of 376 TiB.
Also makes me think about whether/how much I currently link to imgur in various places on the internet, and whether there's anything that I should prepare to replace. Do people have suggestions how to best approach this?
Things like “how I renovated my house” or “how the circuitry of this gadget works” told through pictures with supporting texts lives solely on Imgur.
That’s not that bad.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/
If you become popular replace the orange cloud with a Worker. Different TOS and the CEO said it's cool to use workers in this way https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791660
Had to look a bit harder to even find their website (https://www.medialab.la/) - 'a holding company of consumer internet brands' heh, sheesh, yeah that's not sketchy.
Edit: Sorry missed that was news from the 16th:
I use to think the same thing, until I listened to this episode of Darknet Diaries:
I find it curious that there's no page about who owns/runs MediaLab. Not even a single blurb about their executives/management!
Edit: To anyone who doesn't get the joke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_CaZ4EAexQ
They were also indirectly responsible for the whole leftpad disaster lol.
All I can think of is that silicon valley tech disrupt bit. "We're making the world a better place...through paxos algorithms for consensus protocols."
It's not "none uses anymore" anymore, it's widely used for nefarious and degenerate sexual solicitation and shit like that.
Normal procedure seems to be that each company links to the other companys statement on the deal.
Also, are we sure they're not "joining Medialab", most Silicon Vally type companies always state that their joining some other company. Not Imgur, nope straight up acquired, which is at least honest.
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...
He did an AMA 3 years later: https://old.reddit.com//r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgu...
Imgur really did change everything.
The only thing i found annoying with Imgur is the mobile site not allowing zooming for some reason (can be bypassed by loading the desktop version but it is still an annoyance).
Not sure if this will still be the case going forward though. I used to like Minus since they allowed all that stuff plus had unlimited GIF sizes and didn't reencode PNGs to JPGs (not sure if Imgur does that anymore) but after Minus was sold it went to hell and then disappeared completely.
I'd argue they largely still are incapable of handling image uploads. Their gallery system sucks and the redesign just makes it harder to even see what was posted.
This has been reported to the admins dozens of times since it first started happening about 3 months ago, and so far the only response is "we're looking into it". I'm not sure which possibility is more damning: the idea that they're incapable of fixing such an obvious regression, or that they literally don't care because they're trying to irritate everybody enough to switch to the newer, uglier version of the site.
https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/o6ckmr/threads_showin...
people move on that's just life. congrats to the imgur team and good luck for their next adventures.
Github is a massive piece in the developer ecosystem. It drives adoption of other MS products that can integrate with it, and generates a lot of goodwill towards MS.
LinkedIn, eh, that's probably the weakest property. On the other hand, it's massive in the enterprise space - again lots of goodwill, this time from "suits", and maybe some cool metrics about hiring.
Take it back!
Seriously though, I remember MC before it was a kids game. It was already becoming one by the time Microsoft bought it, but since then almost every update has been gimmicks for kids. The world generation is still ridiculous (jungles next to arctics), the weather patterns are binary (hard rain, or nothing), and proximity chat is practically impossible.
They've made a lot of money off making it into a kids game, but I personally haven't been delighted by any updates since they took it over.
I don’t quite agree that every update has been gimmicks for kids - I can’t really point to a “childish” new mechanic added. Maybe your perception of the game has changed?
At the end of the day when you sell a company you are divorcing yourself from the future direction - you might be invited to stay on as an executive - and the new owners might listen to you... or they might not - that's entirely up to them. Any promises or commitments you've made as an executive are only as good as your word - and when you sell your company your word stops having any power (because you sold that power).
I would never shame someone who wanted to keep an ideal going from making an exit they personally need to make - always prioritize your health and happiness over any venture - but when you sell you're accepting the fact that at any moment the buyer may completely reverse the direction of the company.
> Any promises or commitments you've made as an executive are only as good as your word - and when you sell your company your word stops having any power (because you sold that power).
For the company I was talking about above it definitely didn't have a local or particularly regular customer base - they were well known as a market leader but the sort of thing you might buy every few years at most.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur...
https://imgurinc.com/about?forcedesktop=1#huge-impact-little...
I wonder if Reddit would be what it is today without imgur. I started using Reddit shortly before imgur launched, and I can still remember the day that it went live. It was by far the best image uploading experience I'd ever had, and I'd used most (maybe every) major uploader that came before them, between 1995 and 2009.
It would probably be different, but not worse or better. I was there when Imgur launched, and at the time we thanked Imgur for dealing with the crap of hosting images (checking for child porn, dealing with DMCA notices and other copyright and privacy issues, etc). Had they not existed, reddit would have just done that ourselves.
Eventually reddit did do that themselves, but by then Imgur had their own community. I suspect some of those people would still be on reddit.
I remember the writing was on the wall when someone said, making fun of "imgurians" as people who thought of imgur as "a site to go to" and not just an image host for reddit. It keeps getting more and more user hostile with dark patterns etc. The other day I tried to just go to my page of image uploads on mobile and flat out could not. The site would not let me even though I know the exact url.
It was sad, if inevitable to watch imgur become the exact same garbage site it was trying to replace.
Time to download my stuff I guess.
Edit: Looks like it was in the original FAQ.
> 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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090226191747/https://imgur.com...
It doesn't bode well for Imgur future. They don't care about their acquisition. It's to wonder why are they doing it in the first place.
The company doesn't have any public information either. All I can find is a LONG list of job openings: https://jobs.lever.co/medialab
Weird list if they are just "investors".
Big spree of acquisitions! Anyone have any idea the goal?
It’s a strategy as old as time. Sometimes it works (IAC, is arguably a good example of a company who has bought or funded companies at various stages of distress/hype (and incubated some that are very successful in their own right, like Match Group) and managed to get goodish CPMs across the sites they bundle together), most of the time it doesn’t. But the goal is to acquire the brand/traffic, cut costs to the bone, and attempt to profit off the traffic by selling ads or user data or whatever. It’s a rollup play and the goal is definitely not to invest back into the companies themselves any more than they need to run.
Also, this reminds me of Computer Associates' (later CA Technologies) business model: buy enterprise software companies with locked-in customers, fire staff and cut costs as far as possible, and increase maintenance fees, all with the understanding the the business will deteriorate over time. I think here the equivalent of "increase maintenance fees" may be "load up the product with even more ads".
Different people respond to different things
CD would be us being uncomfortable with the conflict and possibly resolving it.
https://www.distractify.com/p/what-happened-to-kik
Edit: fixed spelling mistake
Honestly, this is probably the best outcome they could hope for. I suspect their growth has stagnated and are losing mindshare in the meme economy to Reddit and Discord. Imgur was started in a very different world from today and they didn't evolve enough.
Regardless, I'm grateful to them. Imgur will always have a soft spot in my heart.
(the only addon I have is uBlock origin, and I'm too lazy to try turning it off for some random images)
It also downloads like 6 megabytes worth of local content. Doesn't matter if you are going to the imgur page of the image, or literally the URI to the image file itself.
http://example.com/foobar.png <- if an url looks like that, I expect a direct link to the image... not some freaky redirect to a shitty webpage with floating popups, cookie prompts and "download the app"... why do I need an app to view a fucking image?! I already have one, it's called a browser!
The Imgur community is almost completely toxic. Imgur apparently care about my privacy, but still want to share information with 1200 different "partners". It's also the most effective way of draining the battery of any device you use. Even the new M1 MacBooks will burn through battery like there's no tomorrow if you load the Imgur website in Safari, or worse any other browser.
It's not a great site and haven't been for years.
It's all user-submitted content. One was either a link or a blurb of text, the other was imagery.
Most people who use imgur just hotlink - what's the incentive for a company to buy or start a new imgur?
Then it works and you need to pay the bills
10 years later you sell it and some new guy makes one
Congrats on any exit, but this one has to be a letdown and I’m sure it didn’t work out for any of the non-founders with options that are now assuredly worthless, but congrats on an exit nonetheless.
As to migrating... I know you can download all the pictures in your account. But is there any way to include the corresponding top (or most recent) referrer so you know the places you need to go to update URL's?
I pay the monthly $5 fee for 50gb, and I have no complaints yet. And if I ever have a product idea -- their website is open source, so I can just fork their project and make my own business.
ps. Have you noticed how 9 gag shows you violence or racism every day in one of the top 5 posts. As tought that "happy site" is trying to make you angry...
> medialab is a holding company of consumer internet brands.
They rolled out a feature where you can filter out political posts, and it's become the only place I can go to just enjoy some mindless scrolling.
There's still a ton of political posters who never tag, but you can mute them. And then there's the "look how dumb those people are" circle jerks, that aren't actually political. But all in all, I have a pretty decent quality to circle jerk ratio.
not really scalable
There's still a ton of offenders, but only so many super prolific ones.
Before the 2016 election it was full of Pro-trump meme content. Now there is absolutely none and it's full of orthodox Democrat boosting meme content with any Republican mention advancing the idea that the whole party and all its supporters are completely beyond redemption being in league with Satan himself.
No way that's not curated, for mine and I think it will backfire.
Any suggestions for alternative no bullshit image hosting services?
Reddit did a pretty good job of going from simple and relatively lightweight to bloated and unusable in a very short timeframe.
Interesting that there are at least three 'Medialab' brands, one is the management platform for healthcare, one is a department at MIT, and then there is Medialab the holding company (https://www.medialab.la/) which bought Genius (YC S11) too.
I may be too cynical because I'm guessing they are going to give it the 'Sourceforge' treatment.
This really confused me. The logos of the management platform and MIT are practically the same as well.
I just sent one asking them to never change it.
Sarcasm aside, it'd be cool if they got their shit together.