> Most of the users cost more than they earn

I call bullshit. Can you spell datamining?

also: native advertising.

That's rather hard to do if your site mainly serves hotlinked or embedded images. You don't have the level of interaction required for meaningful data.

Hits and content analysis is all google needed to become successful. There are native comments in /all/, on reddit and maybe the referrer set in the header.

I would be very interested to hear what data you think imgur could sell.

Also, I know that on a website like imgur native pays about as little as display. The fact that imgur tried Taboola a while ago and eventually ditched it seems to corroborate this.

Imgur's users are pseudo-anonymous, just like reddit and HN. Advertisers aren't really willing to pay much for that when they can target accurate user profiles like Facebook or anything that connects with Facebook.

Heavy emphasis on the pseudo part of that I assume? A quick glance at third party sites accessed when loading imgur.com:

   - facebook
   - twitter
   - amazon ads   
   - google ads 
   - quantserve 
   - google analytics
   - scorecardresearch

Because this is pretty much the standard list for any major site, each of those providers has a highly detailed profile built for the average web user. While the top three will often have login data associated, there's plenty of capability for data mining without that. This excludes data other providers can glean from the actions taken and data rendered by those top three providers - I haven't kept up on the state of that and I don't know how possible it still is.

And how many of those services share their user profiles with imgur so that imgur can monetize that data by selling expensive premium ads to advertisers?

No one is arguing that facebook/google/tw... (well maybe twitter heheh) aren't profitably mining lots of user data. But imgur probably isn't able to mine much value out of it's own data.

scorecardresearch is the endpoint for comScore which is used to do exactly what you mentioned. Imgur buys the data from comScore as a sort of "online Nielsen rating" in order to sell the value of the site to ad vendors.

If imgur has to buy profiling data from someone else, it isn't really their data is it? That is, imgur could not recreate that same data alone, they need the partner who can get the missing data from the rest of the partner's network.

The bottom line is imgur's data is probably not worth much, what _is_ worth a lot is imgurs traffic, and that traffic is taking a hit from adblock.

They can play the old switcharoo and sell the data to that vendor.

Sure, good luck datamining a hotlinked image (or showing ads there)

Well. You could add ads to hotlinked images. They would not be clickable though

As if a facebook-like was much more to go by ...

> I call bullshit. Can you spell datamining?

Pretty sure you just suggested they make money by datamining cat gif and dank meme traffic...