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Maybe they are trying to cash out? Instead of building a sustainable model, they are banking on some people paying because their service is broken right now, an

Maybe they are trying to cash out? Instead of building a sustainable model, they are banking on some people paying because their service is broken right now, and after the initial inrush of cash, as everyone leaves they will shutter the whole thing.

throwanem 9y ago
I can buy that. They've been an also-ran for a very long time now, ever since Imgur (at least!) came along and ate their lunch.
- IgorPartola 9y ago
  And now I wonder how long it'll be until someone comes along and eats Imgur's lunch. Imgur is now a community, not just an image host, so there is some value there, but monetizing it from what I understand is a struggle. And a cheap image host alternative is very low cost of entry. I read somewhere that this particular business goes in a cycle of: dominant player starts trying to monetize, that pisses off the users, one of the users creates a new free/fast/easy-to-use clone and everyone migrates, and then that new company starts running an actual business and wants to monetize, resetting the cycle. I am sure this is the case with more than just image hosting, but image hosting in particular takes like 20 hours and a few hundred bucks to get started and scales very poorly as you get into multiple millions of users.
  - Nadya 9y ago
    Bit of Google searching, found what I was looking for: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810889 Image/File hosting sites are much like you described. 1. All existing options suck because of feature bloat/ads/slowness/what have you 2. "I can run my own!" 3. Popularity explodes for being better (no ads, faster, etc.) 4. Bandwidth costs increase due to growth 5. Owner tries adding ads and other features (paid accounts, file size/bandwidth limits etc.) to help with bandwidth costs 6. This host shuts down or enters into the ring of "sucky existing options" barely keeping afloat 7. The cycle continues
    - throwanem 9y ago
      I don't have an Imgur account; I just use it ad hoc for sharing low-res photo excerpts and whatever else in IRC channels. (Palaver's integration in particular makes this easy.) But based on occasional browsing and the odd bit of inside baseball that makes it to the front page, I'd surmise Imgur is somewhere between stages 4 and 5 on your list, and closer to the latter than the former. I'm sure its eventual successor is doing a slow burn toward virality even now.
    - IgorPartola 9y ago
      Excellent find. Yes I was wondering if it's possible to run a gambit like this and come out profitable. Sounds like that's very unlikely. Edit: is "gambit business" a term? Because if not: (tm)!
- pmiller2 9y ago
  I don't recall ever seeing imgur-hosted images extensively on any other site than Reddit.
  - trekologer 9y ago
    Not many sites show the source of the image like Reddit does. For most uses, the viewer doesn't know where the image is coming from, just that it is there on the page, and that is quite hard to do as an ad-supported service.

throwanem 9y ago

I can buy that. They've been an also-ran for a very long time now, ever since Imgur (at least!) came along and ate their lunch.

IgorPartola 9y ago
And now I wonder how long it'll be until someone comes along and eats Imgur's lunch. Imgur is now a community, not just an image host, so there is some value there, but monetizing it from what I understand is a struggle. And a cheap image host alternative is very low cost of entry. I read somewhere that this particular business goes in a cycle of: dominant player starts trying to monetize, that pisses off the users, one of the users creates a new free/fast/easy-to-use clone and everyone migrates, and then that new company starts running an actual business and wants to monetize, resetting the cycle. I am sure this is the case with more than just image hosting, but image hosting in particular takes like 20 hours and a few hundred bucks to get started and scales very poorly as you get into multiple millions of users.
- Nadya 9y ago
  Bit of Google searching, found what I was looking for: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810889 Image/File hosting sites are much like you described. 1. All existing options suck because of feature bloat/ads/slowness/what have you 2. "I can run my own!" 3. Popularity explodes for being better (no ads, faster, etc.) 4. Bandwidth costs increase due to growth 5. Owner tries adding ads and other features (paid accounts, file size/bandwidth limits etc.) to help with bandwidth costs 6. This host shuts down or enters into the ring of "sucky existing options" barely keeping afloat 7. The cycle continues
  - throwanem 9y ago
    I don't have an Imgur account; I just use it ad hoc for sharing low-res photo excerpts and whatever else in IRC channels. (Palaver's integration in particular makes this easy.) But based on occasional browsing and the odd bit of inside baseball that makes it to the front page, I'd surmise Imgur is somewhere between stages 4 and 5 on your list, and closer to the latter than the former. I'm sure its eventual successor is doing a slow burn toward virality even now.
  - IgorPartola 9y ago
    Excellent find. Yes I was wondering if it's possible to run a gambit like this and come out profitable. Sounds like that's very unlikely. Edit: is "gambit business" a term? Because if not: (tm)!
pmiller2 9y ago
I don't recall ever seeing imgur-hosted images extensively on any other site than Reddit.
- trekologer 9y ago
  Not many sites show the source of the image like Reddit does. For most uses, the viewer doesn't know where the image is coming from, just that it is there on the page, and that is quite hard to do as an ad-supported service.