15 ms·

Imgur launches video

158 points by el_duderino 8y ago

scrollaway 8y ago
Feels like just yesterday that "doing video" was the most efficient way to burn giant piles of money. What changed? Compression got better, but it doesn't feel like bandwidth got cheaper. Is it all just because it's easier to spin up a video hosting infrastructure on some cloud stack?
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Can’t insert ads into GIFs easily. On video it’s trivial.
  - wlesieutre 8y ago
    They serve tons of "gifs" as video files already, anything labeled as a gifv is really an html5 video element with MP4 or WebM. It looks just as good and loads much faster. You could put ads on that just as easily, but it'd be a huge dick move if the ads had sound.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      Right, and the draw of GIFs is that they have no sound. I’m pretty sure this move might kill Imgur, not that they had a business to begin with. Reddit already switched to an in house S3 bucket and CDN for UGC uploads a while ago, content will either age out with attrition or be backfilled by users. Imgur is going to be quite the ArchiveTeam project.
      - TremendousJudge 8y ago
        reddit video is complete garbage though
        TooBrokeToBeg 8y ago
        I've found it perfectly serviceable. Especially when youtube is blocked by corporate policy.
        zwily 8y ago
        What corporate policy blocks Youtube but not Reddit? :)
        Symbiote 8y ago
        Companies concerned about bandwidth rather than content. I used to work somewhere that banned radio streaming sites, until the local ISP became willing to upgrade the connection.
        always_good 8y ago
        They're probably paying for some low-tier bandwidth. That's something that can always be changed. But the real upside is that your uploads will live along with your reddit post. Amazing how reddit becomes a dead-link factory when you go back just one year.
        pavs 8y ago
        I don't know what low-tier BW means (I own an ISP), I think they problem reddit video is that their video infrastructure is most likely not geographically distributed and also not have peering with major telcos, which gives you high latency and poor playback for people who lives far from reddit video servers. Maybe they will eventually fix it, not sure if they have that much money to burn on repeated memes and porn videos.
        always_good 8y ago
        You own an ISP and couldn't even fathom a guess? Which ISP so I can remember this little exchange?
        8y ago
      - walrus01 8y ago
        I give it about 50-50 odds that doing this doesn't kill it but relegates it to irrelevancy, like Photobucket and similar.
      - wlesieutre 8y ago
        Maybe I'm unlucky but in my experience the reddit video player is terrible and maybe 25% of the of the time just gives me a black box or the first frame and won't play. It also has the caveat that if you want to share it with someone you have to send them a link to the reddit comment thread, which is not always desired or appropriate.
        chipperyman573 8y ago
        BTW I've had the same problem, the solution is to just click it twice (once to "pause" it and once to unpause it). For what it's worth I've only gotten this problem since chrome released their update that disables autoplay (https://blog.chromium.org/2018/03/chrome-66-beta-css-typed-object-model.html https://blog.chromium.org/2018/03/chrome-66-beta-css-typed-o...). I think the black box just means that the first frame is black
        wlesieutre 8y ago
        Most of the times I've had it are on iOS, and no amount of tapping or putting it in full screen mode where you can use the native video controls will make it load. I wonder if they're trying to serve WebM or some other unsupported codec to iOS devices by accident, but I'd think that would have some kind of error indication instead of a black box.
        ohtwenty 8y ago
        I recently discovered that youtube-dl works on v.redd.it links, so you can download and share the vids directly. But I'm with you 100%, their video and image hosting is super slow, and needs to be paused/unpaused a few times before loading or playing anything.
      - debaserab2 8y ago
        I absolutely hate that you can't link directly to the media on reddit's hosting service. If I share something with a friend, I usually am not doing it so they can read a forum of internet comments first. This is something that imgur hasn't done and will continue to be an important differentiator for me.
      - pjc50 8y ago
        Almost every image I see on Reddit uses imgur, and some subreddits have an explicit ban on using Reddit image hosting for some reason.
  - shabble 8y ago
    what's the difficulty in splicing in some additional frames at upload or request-time? From what I vaguely recall of the format it's essentially a stream of stream of independent frames with some timing info, although there might be something about colour palette selection? I'm sure there could be something that makes it especially horrible, but curious what it is :-) Isn't video advertising mostly handled at a higher layer by sticking some segments into the playlist/container rather than actually encoding it into a single video unit anyway?
    - gm-conspiracy 8y ago
      Maybe w MJPEG.
    - mseebach 8y ago
      GIF is only 256 colours, so the renderer optimises the living daylights out of the palette to make things look vaguely uncrappy. Any ad inserted would have to only use those colours (which are then very different from GIF to GIF). That's a tough sell for brand graphic designers. GIFs are also often short loops, breaking the loop with an ad, especially when inserted automatically, will break a high number, if not most, of the good GIFs in circulation. Doing anything dynamically also breaks caching which is probably undesirable when most of your business is pumping dumb bytes around the net. Finally, you can't add a link. I guess it's still useful for brand advertising, but I suspect that's less valuable than the kind where you can directly track conversions.
      - tekromancr 8y ago
        You can use 256 colors per-frame, as well as using transparancy. Also, each frame is just a diff from the previous frame's content. So it's not unreasonable, just pointless when video formats are so good.
      - always_good 8y ago
        Imgur doesn't use gifs. They transcode to mp4 and webm.
- megaman22 8y ago
  Video ads are the only thing that pay more than peanuts these days, right? Banner ads and display ads are effectively worthless.
  - DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
    “Survey-ads” are an option too. There’s a couple of similar Mechanical Turk micro-task vendors but they’re selective about who they partner with.
  - jsonne 8y ago
    Search and social command decent amounts as well but those are effectively controlled by 4 companies. For the wide internet, yes video ads are where the money is at.
- walrus01 8y ago
  Bandwidth in terms of IP transit purchased at major IX points is a lot cheaper now. Also it is possible to offload a lot of traffic by settlement free peering if you have the money and scale to build a network with POPs in about 8 to 12 major carrier ix points in the USA. If you are a huge content source downstream singlehomed eyeball ISPs are happy to peer with you.
  - derefr 8y ago
    What caused this change? Carrier-hotel POP infrastructure [both technical and legal/regulatory] set up to serve Netflix and Cloudflare having positive externalities?
    - walrus01 8y ago
      One of many reasons: Huge, fat pipes inter city are a lot cheaper now. What you used to pay for one 10GbE transport circuit on somebody's dwdm system will now buy 100GbE. Another reason, stuff is clustered close together now. Exampels being the datacenters in Hillsboro OR and Ashburn VA.
- nitwit005 8y ago
  I would assume they feel they can force people to watch a video ad prior to viewing a video, which isn't true for normal image hosting.
- freeone3000 8y ago
  A webm is actually smaller than the original gif, usually small enough to also pack in an mp3 track and still end up smaller than the original. Compression getting better is a huge part of this.
  - devmunchies 8y ago
    but webm doesn't work on iOS, right? that seems like a deal breaker for a viral image/video site.
    - opencl 8y ago
      Imgur has been using video files instead of GIFs for years already, they call it GIFV. Anything over 2MB is autoconverted to (IIRC) h264 encoded mp4 files. They just added the ability to include sound.
- danielrhodes 8y ago
  In a nutshell: video advertising became a very lucrative thing, easily offsetting the costs of bandwidth. I think anybody who was involved in video from 2005 onwards knew this would eventually happen, but this really came to fruition in the past 5 years.
- aphextron 8y ago
  Bandwidth isn't so much the problem, but transcoding. It's extremely CPU intensive and until very recently you either had to roll your own infrastructure from metal up, or pay insane EC2 prices to transcode uploaded videos. Now AWS has Elastic Transcoder, and there are a multitude of smaller SaaS popping up providing the same.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  Doing video is cheap. Doing video well and without scaling issues (especially) live is still quite expensive. Not as bad as it used to be but still, it can eat up quite a bit of money. You'd need some way to monetize it if you are not going to limit clip length. Alternatively, at an even larger scale the equation turns around and suddenly you can set up your own fiber network and get some support from ISPs because you reduce their transit costs if they get your fiber into their 'meet-me' rooms. Doing video on a third party cloud environment would be prohibitively expensive.
  - danielrhodes 8y ago
    It’s certainly easier than it was before, but video is also as hard as ever because of the many moving parts. To replicate YouTube (in terms of basic features, not scale), you need: - robust transcoding that is reasonably fast, into a multitude of different formats to accommodate web and mobile (example problem: do you support vertical videos) - a good CDN at the best cost you can. videos need to start almost immediately - ability to snap thumbnails and other artifacts - lots of storage - a fast single page app - content controls (because a lot of people upload porn) - a good extensible player that supports fullscreen and VAST ads and whatever else - a robust uploader that can reliably handle large chunked uploads I remember a quote from Chad Hurley where he said the reason YouTube succeeded was because unlike its competitors, who were all offering similar services, it didn’t suck. Given this laundry list of must-haves, you can see why it was so easy to suck.
- bitL 8y ago
  Middle-out compression solved it, when ran on the new Internet(tm), sharing bandwidth of all mobile devices in existence.
- pavs 8y ago
  A general understanding on how to scale massive video platform is well understood now more than ever, but it still remains a very efficient way to burn cash. To give you an example: I own an ISP and about 2 years ago, we got first GGC node (basically youtube CDN), they are provided free by Google to ISPs as long as you are willing to host it at your own expense and you meet a certain bandwidth requirement, I think it was 1gbps youtube traffic at that time. Anyways they send us free 3 fully stacked Dell R720, shipped it us from another country. To the best of my knowledge, each of them cost 5kUSD. Total throughout after saturating ~30 Gbps, we will be given 3 more of these. In our country, to the best of my knowledge, there are 40 ISPs who have these nodes. A least 5 of them have 2 full racks worth of these servers - all free paid for by Youtube/Google. This is just one country. Investment still remains an insane task for video hosting.
starshadowx2 8y ago
Short, shareable videos from a known content-creation minded community reminds me a lot of Vine. I wonder if Imgur is trying to re-energize that community?
- ozzmotik 8y ago
  i was just thinking the exact same thing, I'm glad that I'm not the only one. i really loved vine greatly, and I had been thinking about making a service to replace it, since I really liked the format. Though I think having a 30 second time limit like the imgur video would sort of lose something in the transition, as vines sort of have their impact and memorable nature from their shortness. however there are also often times where I wish a vine did have more time to develop and formulate a cohesive story so I could see longer times as perhaps useful in certain situations.
Rjevski 8y ago
I don’t see how Imgur can be profitable to begin with. Nobody will pay for it, and people are ignoring ads more and more (not to mention that too much intrusive ads, like video ads will drive some people away completely).
- tracker1 8y ago
  It's working for Facebook and Youtube though.
  - GFischer 8y ago
    Facebook yes, Youtube not so much, they're famously unprofitable (although this might finally change or have changed the last couple of years). https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6487324/youtube-profit-1-billion-monthly-users-4-billion-revenue https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6487324/youtube-...
- TheCapn 8y ago
  >Nobody will pay for it I'd pay for it if I was given the option. I like imgur's service. I want to use it for the things I do and would like them to keep being a quick image host. If that means paying annually so I can keep my API key working the way it does and not having my experience ruined by increasingly intrusive advertising I absolutely would throw money their way. There isn't "nobody" out there not willing to invest in their entertainment. I'm sure we're a minority but we're not "nobody".
  - seiferteric 8y ago
    Maybe if all these little sites could band together into a single subscription bundle it would be worth it, but I don't want 20 different subscriptions.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - Rjevski 8y ago
    Yeah, but the main "business" of Imgur seems to be memes and other nonsense, not image hosting. And again, nobody will pay for memes. Competitors like CloudApp or Droplr do image/video hosting much better.
elorant 8y ago
Why isn't any of these sites trying to provide premium services in a subscription model? You have a quarter of a billion users. Find something that 1% of them would pay for, charge $50 annually and you have enough money to keep going for ages. Why does it always has to be advertising?
- cvaidya1986 8y ago
  Users expect free social media. Video sharing et al has been commoditized.
- Jabbles 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Premium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Premium
- infinitismal8 8y ago
  >Find something that 1% of them would pay for, That easy huh
  - codq 8y ago
    I always liked WhatsApp’s $1/year model. $1/year is manageable by just about everyone, and with 250M users (or 1B+ users in the case of WhatsApp), that’s a nice yearly haul.
    - lamlam 8y ago
      I believe whatsapp is free now? I actually only remember paying once.
      - supertrope 8y ago
        Facebook bought WhatsApp
- tschellenbach 8y ago
  Also, this redirects your product development efforts to something thats only useful for 1% of your user base.
Chinjut 8y ago
Oh, cool, I'd be excited to see this video. What is it on?
always_good 8y ago
Why link to techcrunch instead of https://blog.imgur.com/2018/05/29/upload-video-with-sound-on-imgur-for-ios/ https://blog.imgur.com/2018/05/29/upload-video-with-sound-on...?
- mrlatinos 8y ago
  TC won't even load in my HN reader app. Annoying that all of these lightning posters stick with the link from their RSS feed rather than taking the time to find the original source. Always results in mods having to replace. Early bird gets the internet points, I guess...
- code_duck 8y ago
  That link is great to have up front too, but TechCrunch does have an actual article here, not merely blog spam. This includes a talk with Imgur’s COO Roy Seghal.
arprocter 8y ago
They also recently removed the option to close the 'Open in App' nag so it overlays all the time
- baxtr 8y ago
  This is super annoying. Medium has been the worst so far in my opinion (top bar and open in app below take a lot of screen real estate)
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    Reddit finally got me to stop visiting by badgering at every opportunity to use the app.
    - maxk42 8y ago
      LinkedIn is coming close for me.
    - stevenwoo 8y ago
      I've been using RES (Reddit Enhancement Suite) to view reddit on firefox for a long while, didn't realize there was a reddit app.
    - _asummers 8y ago
      There's a toggle to make them stop asking that in the settings, but getting rid of Reddit is better than turning that on, so kudos :)
    - notatoad 8y ago
      The medium nag-badge has got me to do the same thing. i don't click links on HN anymore if they are going to a medium blog. hopefully we aren't the only ones being annoyed by this, if those badges are effective they aren't going away any time soon.
      - mrisoli 8y ago
        As someone who's had to implement one of those nagging popups(and argue with marketing 'growth hackers' about it) I can tell they are unfortunately effective, and it's more likely to see more of them in future. Everyone is annoyed, but many of those who are annoyed will just follow the instructions and increase the metric of whoever wanted those .
djflutt3rshy 8y ago
Way back when Imgur was first announced, not having ANY ads was a proud selling point for the website, then competing against the much more obnoxious Photobucket/ImageShack. 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/faq.php https://web.archive.org/web/20090226191747/https://imgur.com...
- kalleboo 8y ago
  It says right there > unless I end up selling out for a million dollars Even better, he sold out for $40 million.
  - fredley 8y ago
    Seems like there's a gap in the market for an 'ad-free unless I sell out for $1m' image hosting site.
    - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
      You'd need an alternative means of making money then. Photobucket doesn't have ads (AFAIK), but offers making prints off images. What would e.g. a "pro" subscription for an image hosting site look like, without restricting the basic functionality (upload images hassle-free, without an account, and hotlink them anywhere)?
      - stephengillie 8y ago
        Imgur did have a "pro" mode for a while. I was paying them $1 a month. They cancelled it at some point.
        unicornporn 8y ago
        Who needs a pro mode when you have VCs paying!?
rsoto 8y ago
This seems like a lost opportunity for a full fledged YouTube competitor. I know video isn't trivial, but if you're going for it, might as well go big. There are lots of YouTube creators that have been demonetized and are resented at them. It seems like a great opportunity to start capturing little pieces of that huge pie. Almost every YT creator that I follow has been hit with a few copyright strikes, most of them are not even fighting back anymore. Why not offer those «selected» videos a new home? For them, even if on Imgur they earn $1 dollar, it's $1 dollar they are not seeing from YouTube. With some luck they can start to get some niche YouTubers, and after that, a few years later you have a full YT competitor. Sadly, what we get is 30 second max limit, maybe good enough to be another Vine.
- notatoad 8y ago
  YouTube doesn't just demonetize for the fun of it. They do it because advertisers are threatening to pull their ads off the service entirely if there's a risk of being placed against offensive content. What makes you think any youtube competitor would have better luck convincing advertisers to run ads against the same content youtube has demonetized?
  - AndrewUnmuted 8y ago
    It’s possible to monetize video in ways other than submitting to ad-tech.
    - polishTar 8y ago
      YouTube has that too. YT has a paid premium service, purchasable creator sponsorships, superchat, a tickets/merchandise shelf, and an influencer marketing platform (through YT-owned Famebit). These form alternative revenue streams for many creators and are available even if the content isn't running ads.
      - josteink 8y ago
        > YT has a paid premium service Only for people in the US. That essentially means you lose out on 90% of the world market.
danellis 8y ago
It's about time. I never understood the fascination with GIFs. Invariably, FMV GIFs would either be accompanied by, or have requested, a YouTube source video that actually had the audio.
kayamon 8y ago
Imgur has had video for a long time. They only difference is that they're now planning on adding audio as well.

158 points by el_duderino 8y ago

Feels like just yesterday that "doing video" was the most efficient way to burn giant piles of money. What changed? Compression got better, but it doesn't feel like bandwidth got cheaper. Is it all just because it's easier to spin up a video hosting infrastructure on some cloud stack?

toomuchtodo 8y ago
Can’t insert ads into GIFs easily. On video it’s trivial.
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  They serve tons of "gifs" as video files already, anything labeled as a gifv is really an html5 video element with MP4 or WebM. It looks just as good and loads much faster. You could put ads on that just as easily, but it'd be a huge dick move if the ads had sound.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Right, and the draw of GIFs is that they have no sound. I’m pretty sure this move might kill Imgur, not that they had a business to begin with. Reddit already switched to an in house S3 bucket and CDN for UGC uploads a while ago, content will either age out with attrition or be backfilled by users. Imgur is going to be quite the ArchiveTeam project.
    - TremendousJudge 8y ago
      reddit video is complete garbage though
      - TooBrokeToBeg 8y ago
        I've found it perfectly serviceable. Especially when youtube is blocked by corporate policy.
        zwily 8y ago
        What corporate policy blocks Youtube but not Reddit? :)
        Symbiote 8y ago
        Companies concerned about bandwidth rather than content. I used to work somewhere that banned radio streaming sites, until the local ISP became willing to upgrade the connection.
      - always_good 8y ago
        They're probably paying for some low-tier bandwidth. That's something that can always be changed. But the real upside is that your uploads will live along with your reddit post. Amazing how reddit becomes a dead-link factory when you go back just one year.
        pavs 8y ago
        I don't know what low-tier BW means (I own an ISP), I think they problem reddit video is that their video infrastructure is most likely not geographically distributed and also not have peering with major telcos, which gives you high latency and poor playback for people who lives far from reddit video servers. Maybe they will eventually fix it, not sure if they have that much money to burn on repeated memes and porn videos.
        always_good 8y ago
        You own an ISP and couldn't even fathom a guess? Which ISP so I can remember this little exchange?
        8y ago
    - walrus01 8y ago
      I give it about 50-50 odds that doing this doesn't kill it but relegates it to irrelevancy, like Photobucket and similar.
    - wlesieutre 8y ago
      Maybe I'm unlucky but in my experience the reddit video player is terrible and maybe 25% of the of the time just gives me a black box or the first frame and won't play. It also has the caveat that if you want to share it with someone you have to send them a link to the reddit comment thread, which is not always desired or appropriate.
      - chipperyman573 8y ago
        BTW I've had the same problem, the solution is to just click it twice (once to "pause" it and once to unpause it). For what it's worth I've only gotten this problem since chrome released their update that disables autoplay (https://blog.chromium.org/2018/03/chrome-66-beta-css-typed-object-model.html https://blog.chromium.org/2018/03/chrome-66-beta-css-typed-o...). I think the black box just means that the first frame is black
        wlesieutre 8y ago
        Most of the times I've had it are on iOS, and no amount of tapping or putting it in full screen mode where you can use the native video controls will make it load. I wonder if they're trying to serve WebM or some other unsupported codec to iOS devices by accident, but I'd think that would have some kind of error indication instead of a black box.
      - ohtwenty 8y ago
        I recently discovered that youtube-dl works on v.redd.it links, so you can download and share the vids directly. But I'm with you 100%, their video and image hosting is super slow, and needs to be paused/unpaused a few times before loading or playing anything.
    - debaserab2 8y ago
      I absolutely hate that you can't link directly to the media on reddit's hosting service. If I share something with a friend, I usually am not doing it so they can read a forum of internet comments first. This is something that imgur hasn't done and will continue to be an important differentiator for me.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      Almost every image I see on Reddit uses imgur, and some subreddits have an explicit ban on using Reddit image hosting for some reason.
- shabble 8y ago
  what's the difficulty in splicing in some additional frames at upload or request-time? From what I vaguely recall of the format it's essentially a stream of stream of independent frames with some timing info, although there might be something about colour palette selection? I'm sure there could be something that makes it especially horrible, but curious what it is :-) Isn't video advertising mostly handled at a higher layer by sticking some segments into the playlist/container rather than actually encoding it into a single video unit anyway?
  - gm-conspiracy 8y ago
    Maybe w MJPEG.
  - mseebach 8y ago
    GIF is only 256 colours, so the renderer optimises the living daylights out of the palette to make things look vaguely uncrappy. Any ad inserted would have to only use those colours (which are then very different from GIF to GIF). That's a tough sell for brand graphic designers. GIFs are also often short loops, breaking the loop with an ad, especially when inserted automatically, will break a high number, if not most, of the good GIFs in circulation. Doing anything dynamically also breaks caching which is probably undesirable when most of your business is pumping dumb bytes around the net. Finally, you can't add a link. I guess it's still useful for brand advertising, but I suspect that's less valuable than the kind where you can directly track conversions.
    - tekromancr 8y ago
      You can use 256 colors per-frame, as well as using transparancy. Also, each frame is just a diff from the previous frame's content. So it's not unreasonable, just pointless when video formats are so good.
    - always_good 8y ago
      Imgur doesn't use gifs. They transcode to mp4 and webm.
megaman22 8y ago
Video ads are the only thing that pay more than peanuts these days, right? Banner ads and display ads are effectively worthless.
- DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
  “Survey-ads” are an option too. There’s a couple of similar Mechanical Turk micro-task vendors but they’re selective about who they partner with.
- jsonne 8y ago
  Search and social command decent amounts as well but those are effectively controlled by 4 companies. For the wide internet, yes video ads are where the money is at.
walrus01 8y ago
Bandwidth in terms of IP transit purchased at major IX points is a lot cheaper now. Also it is possible to offload a lot of traffic by settlement free peering if you have the money and scale to build a network with POPs in about 8 to 12 major carrier ix points in the USA. If you are a huge content source downstream singlehomed eyeball ISPs are happy to peer with you.
- derefr 8y ago
  What caused this change? Carrier-hotel POP infrastructure [both technical and legal/regulatory] set up to serve Netflix and Cloudflare having positive externalities?
  - walrus01 8y ago
    One of many reasons: Huge, fat pipes inter city are a lot cheaper now. What you used to pay for one 10GbE transport circuit on somebody's dwdm system will now buy 100GbE. Another reason, stuff is clustered close together now. Exampels being the datacenters in Hillsboro OR and Ashburn VA.
nitwit005 8y ago
I would assume they feel they can force people to watch a video ad prior to viewing a video, which isn't true for normal image hosting.
freeone3000 8y ago
A webm is actually smaller than the original gif, usually small enough to also pack in an mp3 track and still end up smaller than the original. Compression getting better is a huge part of this.
- devmunchies 8y ago
  but webm doesn't work on iOS, right? that seems like a deal breaker for a viral image/video site.
  - opencl 8y ago
    Imgur has been using video files instead of GIFs for years already, they call it GIFV. Anything over 2MB is autoconverted to (IIRC) h264 encoded mp4 files. They just added the ability to include sound.
danielrhodes 8y ago
In a nutshell: video advertising became a very lucrative thing, easily offsetting the costs of bandwidth. I think anybody who was involved in video from 2005 onwards knew this would eventually happen, but this really came to fruition in the past 5 years.
aphextron 8y ago
Bandwidth isn't so much the problem, but transcoding. It's extremely CPU intensive and until very recently you either had to roll your own infrastructure from metal up, or pay insane EC2 prices to transcode uploaded videos. Now AWS has Elastic Transcoder, and there are a multitude of smaller SaaS popping up providing the same.
jacquesm 8y ago
Doing video is cheap. Doing video well and without scaling issues (especially) live is still quite expensive. Not as bad as it used to be but still, it can eat up quite a bit of money. You'd need some way to monetize it if you are not going to limit clip length. Alternatively, at an even larger scale the equation turns around and suddenly you can set up your own fiber network and get some support from ISPs because you reduce their transit costs if they get your fiber into their 'meet-me' rooms. Doing video on a third party cloud environment would be prohibitively expensive.
- danielrhodes 8y ago
  It’s certainly easier than it was before, but video is also as hard as ever because of the many moving parts. To replicate YouTube (in terms of basic features, not scale), you need: - robust transcoding that is reasonably fast, into a multitude of different formats to accommodate web and mobile (example problem: do you support vertical videos) - a good CDN at the best cost you can. videos need to start almost immediately - ability to snap thumbnails and other artifacts - lots of storage - a fast single page app - content controls (because a lot of people upload porn) - a good extensible player that supports fullscreen and VAST ads and whatever else - a robust uploader that can reliably handle large chunked uploads I remember a quote from Chad Hurley where he said the reason YouTube succeeded was because unlike its competitors, who were all offering similar services, it didn’t suck. Given this laundry list of must-haves, you can see why it was so easy to suck.
bitL 8y ago
Middle-out compression solved it, when ran on the new Internet(tm), sharing bandwidth of all mobile devices in existence.
pavs 8y ago
A general understanding on how to scale massive video platform is well understood now more than ever, but it still remains a very efficient way to burn cash. To give you an example: I own an ISP and about 2 years ago, we got first GGC node (basically youtube CDN), they are provided free by Google to ISPs as long as you are willing to host it at your own expense and you meet a certain bandwidth requirement, I think it was 1gbps youtube traffic at that time. Anyways they send us free 3 fully stacked Dell R720, shipped it us from another country. To the best of my knowledge, each of them cost 5kUSD. Total throughout after saturating ~30 Gbps, we will be given 3 more of these. In our country, to the best of my knowledge, there are 40 ISPs who have these nodes. A least 5 of them have 2 full racks worth of these servers - all free paid for by Youtube/Google. This is just one country. Investment still remains an insane task for video hosting.

starshadowx2 8y ago

Short, shareable videos from a known content-creation minded community reminds me a lot of Vine. I wonder if Imgur is trying to re-energize that community?

ozzmotik 8y ago
i was just thinking the exact same thing, I'm glad that I'm not the only one. i really loved vine greatly, and I had been thinking about making a service to replace it, since I really liked the format. Though I think having a 30 second time limit like the imgur video would sort of lose something in the transition, as vines sort of have their impact and memorable nature from their shortness. however there are also often times where I wish a vine did have more time to develop and formulate a cohesive story so I could see longer times as perhaps useful in certain situations.

Rjevski 8y ago

I don’t see how Imgur can be profitable to begin with. Nobody will pay for it, and people are ignoring ads more and more (not to mention that too much intrusive ads, like video ads will drive some people away completely).

tracker1 8y ago
It's working for Facebook and Youtube though.
- GFischer 8y ago
  Facebook yes, Youtube not so much, they're famously unprofitable (although this might finally change or have changed the last couple of years). https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6487324/youtube-profit-1-billion-monthly-users-4-billion-revenue https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6487324/youtube-...
TheCapn 8y ago
>Nobody will pay for it I'd pay for it if I was given the option. I like imgur's service. I want to use it for the things I do and would like them to keep being a quick image host. If that means paying annually so I can keep my API key working the way it does and not having my experience ruined by increasingly intrusive advertising I absolutely would throw money their way. There isn't "nobody" out there not willing to invest in their entertainment. I'm sure we're a minority but we're not "nobody".
- seiferteric 8y ago
  Maybe if all these little sites could band together into a single subscription bundle it would be worth it, but I don't want 20 different subscriptions.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Rjevski 8y ago
  Yeah, but the main "business" of Imgur seems to be memes and other nonsense, not image hosting. And again, nobody will pay for memes. Competitors like CloudApp or Droplr do image/video hosting much better.

elorant 8y ago

Why isn't any of these sites trying to provide premium services in a subscription model? You have a quarter of a billion users. Find something that 1% of them would pay for, charge $50 annually and you have enough money to keep going for ages. Why does it always has to be advertising?

cvaidya1986 8y ago
Users expect free social media. Video sharing et al has been commoditized.
Jabbles 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Premium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Premium
infinitismal8 8y ago
>Find something that 1% of them would pay for, That easy huh
- codq 8y ago
  I always liked WhatsApp’s $1/year model. $1/year is manageable by just about everyone, and with 250M users (or 1B+ users in the case of WhatsApp), that’s a nice yearly haul.
  - lamlam 8y ago
    I believe whatsapp is free now? I actually only remember paying once.
    - supertrope 8y ago
      Facebook bought WhatsApp
tschellenbach 8y ago
Also, this redirects your product development efforts to something thats only useful for 1% of your user base.

Chinjut 8y ago

Oh, cool, I'd be excited to see this video. What is it on?

always_good 8y ago

Why link to techcrunch instead of https://blog.imgur.com/2018/05/29/upload-video-with-sound-on-imgur-for-ios/ https://blog.imgur.com/2018/05/29/upload-video-with-sound-on...?

mrlatinos 8y ago
TC won't even load in my HN reader app. Annoying that all of these lightning posters stick with the link from their RSS feed rather than taking the time to find the original source. Always results in mods having to replace. Early bird gets the internet points, I guess...
code_duck 8y ago
That link is great to have up front too, but TechCrunch does have an actual article here, not merely blog spam. This includes a talk with Imgur’s COO Roy Seghal.

arprocter 8y ago

They also recently removed the option to close the 'Open in App' nag so it overlays all the time

baxtr 8y ago
This is super annoying. Medium has been the worst so far in my opinion (top bar and open in app below take a lot of screen real estate)
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Reddit finally got me to stop visiting by badgering at every opportunity to use the app.
  - maxk42 8y ago
    LinkedIn is coming close for me.
  - stevenwoo 8y ago
    I've been using RES (Reddit Enhancement Suite) to view reddit on firefox for a long while, didn't realize there was a reddit app.
  - _asummers 8y ago
    There's a toggle to make them stop asking that in the settings, but getting rid of Reddit is better than turning that on, so kudos :)
  - notatoad 8y ago
    The medium nag-badge has got me to do the same thing. i don't click links on HN anymore if they are going to a medium blog. hopefully we aren't the only ones being annoyed by this, if those badges are effective they aren't going away any time soon.
    - mrisoli 8y ago
      As someone who's had to implement one of those nagging popups(and argue with marketing 'growth hackers' about it) I can tell they are unfortunately effective, and it's more likely to see more of them in future. Everyone is annoyed, but many of those who are annoyed will just follow the instructions and increase the metric of whoever wanted those .

djflutt3rshy 8y ago

Way back when Imgur was first announced, not having ANY ads was a proud selling point for the website, then competing against the much more obnoxious Photobucket/ImageShack. 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/faq.php https://web.archive.org/web/20090226191747/https://imgur.com...

kalleboo 8y ago
It says right there > unless I end up selling out for a million dollars Even better, he sold out for $40 million.
- fredley 8y ago
  Seems like there's a gap in the market for an 'ad-free unless I sell out for $1m' image hosting site.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    You'd need an alternative means of making money then. Photobucket doesn't have ads (AFAIK), but offers making prints off images. What would e.g. a "pro" subscription for an image hosting site look like, without restricting the basic functionality (upload images hassle-free, without an account, and hotlink them anywhere)?
    - stephengillie 8y ago
      Imgur did have a "pro" mode for a while. I was paying them $1 a month. They cancelled it at some point.
      - unicornporn 8y ago
        Who needs a pro mode when you have VCs paying!?

rsoto 8y ago

This seems like a lost opportunity for a full fledged YouTube competitor. I know video isn't trivial, but if you're going for it, might as well go big. There are lots of YouTube creators that have been demonetized and are resented at them. It seems like a great opportunity to start capturing little pieces of that huge pie. Almost every YT creator that I follow has been hit with a few copyright strikes, most of them are not even fighting back anymore. Why not offer those «selected» videos a new home? For them, even if on Imgur they earn $1 dollar, it's $1 dollar they are not seeing from YouTube. With some luck they can start to get some niche YouTubers, and after that, a few years later you have a full YT competitor. Sadly, what we get is 30 second max limit, maybe good enough to be another Vine.

notatoad 8y ago
YouTube doesn't just demonetize for the fun of it. They do it because advertisers are threatening to pull their ads off the service entirely if there's a risk of being placed against offensive content. What makes you think any youtube competitor would have better luck convincing advertisers to run ads against the same content youtube has demonetized?
- AndrewUnmuted 8y ago
  It’s possible to monetize video in ways other than submitting to ad-tech.
  - polishTar 8y ago
    YouTube has that too. YT has a paid premium service, purchasable creator sponsorships, superchat, a tickets/merchandise shelf, and an influencer marketing platform (through YT-owned Famebit). These form alternative revenue streams for many creators and are available even if the content isn't running ads.
    - josteink 8y ago
      > YT has a paid premium service Only for people in the US. That essentially means you lose out on 90% of the world market.

danellis 8y ago

It's about time. I never understood the fascination with GIFs. Invariably, FMV GIFs would either be accompanied by, or have requested, a YouTube source video that actually had the audio.

kayamon 8y ago

Imgur has had video for a long time. They only difference is that they're now planning on adding audio as well.