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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 th

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)!

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)!