4 ms·

My guess is that imgur started out profitable but that ended when gifs became popular. /r/all is about 50% gifs nowadays. The low bandwidth of an image host mak

by Melk 10y ago

My guess is that imgur started out profitable but that ended when gifs became popular. /r/all is about 50% gifs nowadays. The low bandwidth of an image host makes it possible to allow hotlinking but that doesn't work with videos.

derefr 10y ago
Good point! I distinctly recall Imgur being started because it was one of those "this used to be something hard, but now Moore's law has made it easy" services. Imgur could afford to allow hotlinking because actually serving images had become a trivial cost. Because no other image-host had capitalized on this, Imgur cleaned up—for a while. Once people started shifting to sharing content mostly as really-inefficiently-compressed ten-second videos (which are still pretty large when efficiently recompressed), Imgur's original business model was dead in the water. Maybe one day gifs will be as cheap to serve as images are now—but it won't be any time in the next few years.
- kbrosnan 10y ago
  Any modern browser visiting imgur gets H.264/WebM instead of the uncompressed gif. They introduced this 2.5 years ago. After a couple smaller gif only sites made the practice popular. https://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/ https://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/
  - derefr 10y ago
    That is indeed what I meant by "efficiently recompressed." 10 seconds of H.264 video are still a lot larger than a JPEG.
    - throwaway2048 10y ago
      of comparable resolution maybe, but the file size is still not large for say a 640x480 video, less than a few Megabytes.
  - hawkice 10y ago
    October 2014 -> May 2016 is 1.5 years, not 2.5. It's all of 2015 and bits of 2014 and 2016.
  - arenaninja 10y ago
    I stopped clicking imgur gifv links a looong time ago. They worked for me maybe one out of eight times. By now I have an allergic reaction just to seeing them, even if the issues may have been fixed by now.
  - brotoss 10y ago
    No it started when 4chan allowed WebM
  - Pxtl 10y ago
    2.5 years and it still never works on mobile.
- wlesieutre 10y ago
  As others have mentioned, most of the videos are served as "gifv" videos, which are much more bandwidth conscious than actual gifs. It's worth highlighting that Gfycat is managing to operate as a short gif/video hosting service without turning awful, though I obviously don't know what their financials look like. Gfycat does have a homepage of popular gifs, but they've never shown them to me unless I wanted to see them. The viewer page is just the viewer.
CJefferson 10y ago
Actually the funny thing is, they mostly aren't gifs, imgur is converting them to mp4s for as many users as possible. They are still often 1-2MB however, which I'm sure adds up, compared to the jpegs they started off distributing.
consto 10y ago
I'm guessing imgurs switch to webm (gifv) has helped with at least bandwidth costs.
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
The drive to make imgur its own community with its own comments, logins, etc greatly predates its support of gifv. If anything gifv has saved it tremendous bandwidth. Its been hosting gifs since the beginning, even absurd 50-100mb ones. They never bothered to put in a reasonable file size limit. Also, this move also only happened when a lot of traffic was going to gfycat, which supported mp4/h264/webm/whatever files for ages. gifv support from imgur pretty much killed them. I think the larger narrative is that imgur wasn't some geek's side project. It was a VC-run enterprise that will eventually find a way to be profitable. I think ultimately, this type of service is difficult to monetize. Reddit running its own makes a lot of sense. From an experience perspective, my god, its terrible. I'm constantly being nagged to install the imgur app and sometimes Im not sure if the comments I'm seeing are reddit's or imgur's due to using a dark theme on my reddit app. Its all around a shitshow and I'm surprised reddit tolerated them for so long.
- dexterdog 10y ago
  But it was some geek's side project originally.

by Melk 10y ago

derefr 10y ago

Good point! I distinctly recall Imgur being started because it was one of those "this used to be something hard, but now Moore's law has made it easy" services. Imgur could afford to allow hotlinking because actually serving images had become a trivial cost. Because no other image-host had capitalized on this, Imgur cleaned up—for a while. Once people started shifting to sharing content mostly as really-inefficiently-compressed ten-second videos (which are still pretty large when efficiently recompressed), Imgur's original business model was dead in the water. Maybe one day gifs will be as cheap to serve as images are now—but it won't be any time in the next few years.

kbrosnan 10y ago
Any modern browser visiting imgur gets H.264/WebM instead of the uncompressed gif. They introduced this 2.5 years ago. After a couple smaller gif only sites made the practice popular. https://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/ https://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/
- derefr 10y ago
  That is indeed what I meant by "efficiently recompressed." 10 seconds of H.264 video are still a lot larger than a JPEG.
  - throwaway2048 10y ago
    of comparable resolution maybe, but the file size is still not large for say a 640x480 video, less than a few Megabytes.
- hawkice 10y ago
  October 2014 -> May 2016 is 1.5 years, not 2.5. It's all of 2015 and bits of 2014 and 2016.
- arenaninja 10y ago
  I stopped clicking imgur gifv links a looong time ago. They worked for me maybe one out of eight times. By now I have an allergic reaction just to seeing them, even if the issues may have been fixed by now.
- brotoss 10y ago
  No it started when 4chan allowed WebM
- Pxtl 10y ago
  2.5 years and it still never works on mobile.
wlesieutre 10y ago
As others have mentioned, most of the videos are served as "gifv" videos, which are much more bandwidth conscious than actual gifs. It's worth highlighting that Gfycat is managing to operate as a short gif/video hosting service without turning awful, though I obviously don't know what their financials look like. Gfycat does have a homepage of popular gifs, but they've never shown them to me unless I wanted to see them. The viewer page is just the viewer.

CJefferson 10y ago

Actually the funny thing is, they mostly aren't gifs, imgur is converting them to mp4s for as many users as possible. They are still often 1-2MB however, which I'm sure adds up, compared to the jpegs they started off distributing.

consto 10y ago

I'm guessing imgurs switch to webm (gifv) has helped with at least bandwidth costs.

drzaiusapelord 10y ago

The drive to make imgur its own community with its own comments, logins, etc greatly predates its support of gifv. If anything gifv has saved it tremendous bandwidth. Its been hosting gifs since the beginning, even absurd 50-100mb ones. They never bothered to put in a reasonable file size limit. Also, this move also only happened when a lot of traffic was going to gfycat, which supported mp4/h264/webm/whatever files for ages. gifv support from imgur pretty much killed them. I think the larger narrative is that imgur wasn't some geek's side project. It was a VC-run enterprise that will eventually find a way to be profitable. I think ultimately, this type of service is difficult to monetize. Reddit running its own makes a lot of sense. From an experience perspective, my god, its terrible. I'm constantly being nagged to install the imgur app and sometimes Im not sure if the comments I'm seeing are reddit's or imgur's due to using a dark theme on my reddit app. Its all around a shitshow and I'm surprised reddit tolerated them for so long.

dexterdog 10y ago
But it was some geek's side project originally.