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Comment by codexon | Hacker News Reader

The reason why Imgur got so big was because all the other image upload providers started monetizing themselves by blocking direct links and limiting traffic. No one else wanted to be stuck with huge bandwidth bills on hard to monetize reddit visitors where most of them have adblock.

For some reason people feel obligated to link to the Imgur page instead of directly to the image. This allows Imgur to make money off the ads on the page. Maybe this is because the founder made it seem like he made the site just to solve Reddit's image hosting problems for free(he also made a similar announcement on Digg).

Without this support and the growth of unlimited bandwidth servers, I don't think Imgur would have became so big.

If they decide to disallow hotlinking or add more intrusive ads, another replacement would pop up. This is probably why the founder wants to focus on getting revenue in a different way.

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> founder made it seem like he made the site just to solve Reddit's image hosting problems for free

I can't find the reference, but IIRC he (the founder of Imgur) didn't make any money for the first couple of years, as the bandwidth costs were crazy high. But he was happy to do so, because it helped the community there.

> Without this support and the growth of unlimited bandwidth servers

Without the support of his community he wouldn't have made it. I also remember him saying something along the lines of "I make no money to pay for bandwidth if you reference the .jpg file itself, but I still allow it. So I simply just ask the community to use the Imgur URL". It became part of Reddit culture to do the latter, because the users valued the service.

TL;DR - Provide a valuable service, don't piss of your users, and you can actually make some money.

In the article is states:

"The company is also profitable, and it has been since about a year after the site launched."

From the article:

> The company is also profitable, and it has been since about a year after the site launched. Schaaf declined to share the specifics on what those profits are, but they are at least high enough to have moved the Imgur team from their roots in Ohio to a snazzy new San Francisco office with 10 full-time employees and three contractors/part-time workers.

I'd like to add that they also provide many useful features, like nice album views and bulk downloads. And I suspect those useful features, combined with the eye-friendly design, help make people much more likely to paste non-direct links.

But the question is: Would those other image dumps would have stopped putting in hotlink protection if they knew people would change back to non-direct links?

Or is it because the founder of imgur told people he made imgur just to help Reddit users?

Before imgur, most links were direct.

The answer to this question should be interesting to entrepreneurs here: Is it a good strategy to create a business for a large social network under the pretense of public good? Is the sheer number of users more important than how monetizable they are and the likelihood they will reciprocate?

They also offer pro accounts too for ~$25 a year, which I would imagine is fairly useful if you are a heavy user of their service.

For example, since the pro account as no inactivity pruning, I bet you could setup a photography website that hosts tons of images, and use imgur as your primary image host to offset bandwidth use...

I bet one reason why everyone links to the page is because Imgur sets it up that way in their copy-paste links. Makes it easier for non-technical users to link to the page while not placing any actual barrier to direct links.

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