I assume your familiar with their operating costs somehow? I have direct experience at a different (older) host. It was simply not possible to serve the tremendous bandwidth needs without increasingly aggressive monetization. I have no idea what they're costs look like and bandwidth is much cheaper than it was 10 years ago, but I'd wager that there was no profitable business for them at any point without intrusive ads.

> but I'd wager that there was no profitable business for them at any point without intrusive ads.

5 years ago: "but it's profitable enough to hopefully hire another guy or two this summer."[0]

The founder has completely bootstrapped the site since day 1, and has done an AMA on Reddit talking about the whole situation[1]. Ads are absolutely necessary to make it profitable, but clearly taking investment now means they are going to squeeze every ounce of dollar out of the site and hence the sentiment of "aggressive monetization".

[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/eicjf/im_the_imgur_gu...

[1] - https://www.quora.com/How-profitable-is-Imgur-com

That was five years ago, they've experienced explosive growth since then which changes the equation. Because they were profitable then doesn't mean that you can simply linearly grow that as the amount of content being served grows. Particularly when you rely on ad revenue which has been on a downward trend over the last few years.

Point being: unless you have been directly involved in the decisions accusing them of either malevolence or greed is a pretty tough accusation to make. Sometimes (usually) it's cold hard business realities that drive people to adopting these sorts of monetization strategies.

So now the cycle will repeat. Someone will start a host that simply serves images. People will use it. They'll add some ads, people won't care much. They'll start serving more aggressive ads and someone will start another host... over and over again.

>To be fair, they could have operated a simple and effectively profitable business

How? I don't see a way from Imgur to monetize on sharing images directly.

That's literally what they did for years until taking a16z's money...

They did it by building a community around the non-reddit related traffic. Basically redditor's would share imgur links outside the reddit ecosystem (Facebook etc), then other people would visit imgur directly instead of going through reddit. These secondary users are monetizable.

Imgur had to eat the costs of supporting reddit's hotlinking (though not all reddit posts are hotlinked) but that was more or less imgur's "marketing budget."

Datamining. What FB is doing. Sell the info.

Data mining what exactly? Unless you know what in the image, it's hardly interesting that a user with browser fingerprint X viewed some image with a random hash or name.

Sure it is, you can track the site it was hosted on and follow the fingerprint around the web. The image content isn't the juicy bit.

If I can see you viewed an image referred from /r/woodwork I might offer you some woodworking tools and drive up the conversation rate of my advertisements.

> The image content isn't the juicy bit

It is. The wealth of images alone, the sheer amount, from memes to vacation pics is worth so much now that image recognition is taking off.

I was perhaps too dismissive, it is certainly full of information. But I mostly meant for the moment the information most likely to be gleaned will be from referral links.