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Imgur Raises $40M From Andreessen Horowitz
- ozh 13y agoI don't get how such a bandwidth hog can run only off a few ads.
- Splendor 13y agoThat's not their only revenue stream. They also sell Imgur Pro accounts.
- LandoCalrissian 13y agoIt looks like in 2012 they transferred 42PB of data, which is pretty crazy. I assume their numbers are far higher now. It's impressive they can make it all work. I didn't know that Reddit had invested money in the company either, that could potentially be a pretty big boon for them.
- Consultant32452 13y agoI wonder if 42PB of data would trigger a bandwidth cap on my T-Mobile unlimited 4G plan.
- ihuman 13y agoMost "unlimited" plans have caps where they throttle you bandwidth. So you would never reach 42PB per month anyway, let alone 42PB ever.
- Consultant32452 13y agoThat was sort of the joke, but T-Mobile has real unlimited with no throttling or caps.
- landr0id 13y agoI think that if you got to the point where you're using a significant amount of mobile data and you alone are impacting other customers' experience significantly, they'd ask you to knock it off.
- psykovsky 13y agoOh, you still haven't reached the point of pissing them off with your abuse.
- Matsta 13y agoThey use Edgecast's CDN (which is now owned by Verizon?) https://www.edgecast.com/company/news/edgecast-powers-imgur https://www.edgecast.com/company/news/edgecast-powers-imgur Off the top of my head, I think they offer their bigger clients pricing of $0.02-0.04 per gigabyte. I could be wrong though. 44040192gb *0.02 = $880,803 / 12 = $73,400/month.
- linuxydave 13y agoLooks like they don't anymore $ curl -sI http://i.imgur.com/S1iGm2E.jpg http://i.imgur.com/S1iGm2E.jpg | grep Server Server: cloudflare-nginx
- IgorPartola 13y agoDon't you know? HostGator gives you unlimited bandwidth? :) Realistically, bandwidth is relatively cheap and the type of advertising they show on Imgur is likely pretty expensive. Anything to do with home buying (what I've been seeing lately) is usually pretty expensive CPC-wise.
- raverbashing 13y agoMy experiences with HostGator indicate that, even though they may offer unlimited bandwidth, your site will stop at the first slightest increased usage
- IgorPartola 13y agoThat's the joke. Unlimited in all cases I experienced means "limited in a fashion you do not know and cannot control". For anything serious, stay away from unlimited plans (think Backblaze's unlimited storage), else suffer the wrath of the acceptable use policy.
- linuxydave 13y agoTheir 'unlimited bandwidth' pitch is just marketing BS. The shared hosting industry has thin profit margins and so they needed to come up with a way to lure in customers and distract them from the fact that they have such strict resource limits that you couldn't use huge amounts of bandwidth anyway.
- DangerousPie 13y agoIf I remember correctly they use Cloudflare quite a bit. This probably decreases their actual traffic by a tremendous amount, since they vast majority of their bandwidth comes from easily cacheable images.
- jonknee 13y agoCloudFlare doesn't bring your bandwidth costs down, it just makes them get sent out faster. It is indeed impressive that they can serve so much based on ads that many people never see (due to embeds and the like).
- DangerousPie 13y agoThis is not correct. If you set the correct headers, Cloudflare routinely caches files on their edge servers and serves them from there. My traffic dropped noticeably after activating Cloudflare, and I am not doing any file hosting.
- revelation 13y agoI think what is meant is that CloudFlare or no CloudFlare, cat pictures have to be transferred and traffic is generated. imgur will have to pay it either way, even if its CloudFlare doing the delivery.
- linuxydave 13y agoYou don't pay for the bandwidth CF uses (well, I don't know about their most expensive package but with the others you don't) and using a CDN drastically reduces your bandwidth bill
- ddorian43 13y agousing cdn increases your bandwidth bill cause cdn bandwidth is pricier than your dedicated-server/rack/colo bandwidth
- korzun 13y agoThe bandwidth now is cheap, when I launched Image Socket I was on two dedicated machines at FDC that served closed to a thousand requests per second. The revenue on advertisements would be 10x (from what I recall) of what I spend on the hardware. The trick is to approach the problem smartly via bandwidth control techniques (ip rate limiting, proper bandwidth queues via ipfilter, etc) and identify abuse early. In 2014, their margins would be (again my opinion) double of what mine where. Hardware is cheaper, bandwidth is cheaper and you have easier access to really fast and complex caching solutions.
- ilaksh 13y agoThey don't. They are running off of a few ads plus 40 million dollars.
- _zen 13y agoimgur should shoot big and host videos. Let people upload videos without an account, just like images. Fuck YouTube and its toxic comments. imgur's comment system and quality of comments are way better.
- binaryjohn 13y agoI believe that is the thinking behind vidd.me
- xpop2027 13y agoI didn't even think of this possible vertical for imgur.. great observation.
- svas 13y agoIf imgur approaches Youtube's scale won't the comments on imgur also become toxic? This still appears to be an unsolved issue (although, one could argue whether it is really an "issue"). Google's G+ approach (barring anonymous comments, etc) does not appear to have addressed the core concern.
- scrollaway 13y agoThe site Sir_Cmpn linked above (https://mediacru.sh https://mediacru.sh) apparently allows video uploads.
- perlpimp 13y agoi have been getting tired of all interface complications on youtube, I think this would be a welcome place for interesting and funny videos - old you tube style. number of things I have too look at and click to get to my channels is slowly growing which is pita. Although I tried using imgur a few times, I could not upload images a number of times, subjectively I don't know how they get that much money for such service... bubble is it?
- cmelbye 13y agoTranscoding videos is very, very expensive.
- baldfat 13y agoRaises = gifted and never will see a return of investment????
- Consultant32452 13y agoMarc Andreessen is on the board of Facebook. My guess is he wants to pump it up and then get Facebook to buy them.
- foobarqux 13y agoLike Oculus?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
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- zimpenfish 13y agoThis is my fear.
- bane 13y agoI'd add that one of the reasons they became so popular is largely due to a very tolerant reddit admin team. Try to make a similar service today and get growth on reddit the same way and you'll likely get added to the global spam block list. Reddit has also invested an undisclosed amount, which Mr. Schaaf said was “very small in comparison.” Regardless of size, the investment from Reddit represents a formal business connection between two entities that have so far shared only a legacy and community. Imgur was originally created as a gift to the Reddit community for easy image sharing, and now has grown to be larger than Reddit itself, pulling in over three billion monthly pageviews. What began as a platform for uploading images, Imgur has become a vibrant and shrewd community of commenters, uploaders and up-voters. edit Here's the origin in case anybody's interested http://www.reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting http://www.reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_cre... If you look at MrGrim's early post history, it's a blatant violation of reddit's anti-spam rule. However, it was (and is) insanely useful and entirely disrupted the image hosting "industry". Even today, the vast majority of MrGrim's posts are imgur posts, which is an explicit violation of the "rules". It's not a knock against imgur or reddit (I love both), just an interesting observation. You can violate the rules if you're not obviously a bad actor. In this case, imgur and MrGrim was clearly spam, but it wasn't the bad kind of spam that everybody hates, it was the good kind of marketing where people actually get something useful from the exchange. edit #2 IIR imgur also had an explicit no porn policy for a very long while, except for NSFW reddits. edit #3 and an AmA http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur_ama/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur_...
- darkstar999 13y ago> Try to make a similar service today and get growth on reddit the same way and you'll likely get added to the global spam block list. I completely disagree. Unless you are being scammy, spammy, or otherwise violating reddit rules, you'd be fine.
- opendais 13y agoThe way the admins went after Sir_Cmpwn makes me think this is incorrect.
- frade33 13y agoSeeing the comments below., the similar questions could be raised for a even bigger bandwidth beast. Youtube. And imgur is essentially the Youtube of images. And speaking of profits, 140 Characters is barely generating any revenue despite it would be the only service of its size consuming the least (hosting) resources. So I guess investors do not see the value in profits rather in popularity when it comes to crazy start-ups. Considering Instagram which got acquired for the ‘notorious’ 1 Billion. If we use the same mathematical formula, I guess imgur is worth at least 2x of Instagram.
- bane 13y agoWhich really make one question the valuations that are out there. If reddit isn't at least a billion dollar company by this measure I don't know what is... Yet they continue to struggle to make operating expenses.
- cloudwalking 13y agoRun rate and valuation are not always directly tied. In all of these cases--Twitter, Instagram, Imgur, Reddit, 9GAG--it's about the community. Reddit may certainly be worth $1B+, but no acquirer wants to buy them and lose money keeping the site up.
- bane 13y agoWell yeah, but they arguably should be part of the valuation model. I realize there's a lot of speculation, past investment history, etc. involved in the valuation, but at some point how much money a company is making and can realistically make should be part of the figuring.
- notastartup 13y agowhere is Andreesen's email? I want to ask him if he wants to invest in my startup.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jscheel 13y agoI'm really interested in this deal. It's always been a bit of an enigma to me how imgur makes money, especially since they have been bootstrapping. I wonder if the numbers looked good to a16z, or if they saw the incredible growth potential of having a large interest in the youtube of images (as frade33 characterized it).
- rgbrgb 13y agoThey make money by showing ads that get millions of views per day and most likely selling information about their users.
- jscheel 13y agoWell, duh ;) I'm just impressed, given the significant bandwidth, that the advertising has been capable of sustaining itself so far.
- rgbrgb 13y agoA high traffic image sharing site can actually be pretty cheap to run. Cloudflare gives you an unlimited bandwidth CDN and incoming bandwidth to S3 is free (uploads can be done directly from the browser). Source: I help run https://surfer.io/ https://surfer.io/
- linuxydave 13y agoOh yeah, CF is a life-saver for sites on a budget
- Kudos 13y agoI think your idea of high traffic is pretty low, Cloudflare will expect you to be on the enterprise plan when you have actual high traffic.
- erichocean 13y ago…which is, on average, $5K/month. Not exactly a ton of money.
- michaelmcmillan 13y agoI'm looking forward to see what they come up with, the first thought that hits me is "how are they going to make money?". Reddit is clearly not profitable, how do they differentiate from a business perspective?
- nols 13y agoImgur has been profitable since the beginning[1]. There are massive differences business and infrastructure-wise between Reddit and Imgur. Imgur has much better ad/pageview ratio than Reddit and is much less dynamic and infrastructure heavy. 1 http://www.neowin.net/news/from-rags-to-riches-the-story-of-imgur http://www.neowin.net/news/from-rags-to-riches-the-story-of-...
- werid 13y agoThese days, I goto imgur frontpage to view the gallery, viewing the daily "funnies" is not done via reddit anymore. My reddit usage is more directly into specific communities, less of the general sub-reddits.
- korzun 13y agoI build image hosting service which was 'great' for it's time (2006) called Image Socket (http://www.imagesocket.com http://www.imagesocket.com). It became extremely successful in just a few days due to support from another (popular at the time) web site called SomethingAwful. Alternatives at the time sucked. Unfortunately I failed to pivot it into something that does not rely exclusively on one or two popular web sites as it's source of traffic. Congrats to Imgur for jumping on Reddit early and a becoming somewhat independent at this point. It's funny that I had an opportunity to compete with them because my site was already build and widely utilized when Reddit came out but I never imaged that Reddit would blow up so fast and by the time it did, competing with Imgur was impossible.
- sargun 13y agoMy guess is that they're probably going to spend some time building their own CDN / image storage. I think they used some combination of dedicated servers, RDBMS, CloudFlare, and AWS. They could save some significant operating costs, without sacrificing a lot of of customer happiness by putting together their own datacenter, and hosting a handful of edge sites (a rack or two, and then fast failover out of the rack). I imagine that the traffic curve on images drops off pretty quickly after a point, and stays down.
- stickydink 13y agoI walk past Imgur's office reasonably often. There's a slightly crumpled-up, inkjet-printed piece of paper with their logo on it, taped to the glass of the front door. Makes me chuckle every time, I hope they don't blow any of this on a fancy door sign.
- allsystemsgo 13y agomaybe they'll get a frame for it.