It says right there

> unless I end up selling out for a million dollars

Even better, he sold out for $40 million.

Seems like there's a gap in the market for an 'ad-free unless I sell out for $1m' image hosting site.

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)?

Imgur did have a "pro" mode for a while. I was paying them $1 a month. They cancelled it at some point.

Who needs a pro mode when you have VCs paying!?

Then the VCs tell you to sell all your users to advertisers?

It's the cycle of image hosts (full article I pinched this from [1])

  - Create a great image hosting website
  - Decide to monetize it
  - Add advertising
  - Stop allowing hotlinking
  - Add more advertising
  - Add social tools like comments, voting - attempt build a community to look at your ads

There'll be a new one that picks up the lions share of the userbase eventually and we'll go through it all over again

[1] https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli...

As others have said MrGrim's predicate was satisfied ;)

But the service is still superior to other competitors, still way better than the two you cite.

Way better than what reddit founders got to sell out to Conde naste. Which is hilarious considering when it came out we were all stoked about reddit and imgur being open source and ad free.

imgur was never open source unless I am missing something. A very early version of Reddit was open source, in the sense, the source code was periodically released minus some secret sauce, they kept to themselves. Last time I checked they stopped releasing source, it was such a long time ago that the current version doesn't even remote resemble their open source version, which is, AFAIK, as good as dead.

Geez, I hope it doesn't happen to Telegram! /s

Momentum of early adopters akin to TAZ principles. PG wrote here what he learned about HN [1] but IIRC there's an essay where he's even more specific.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

Reddit's ads are really unintrusive even today. I don't think we should expect them to operate without something like ads for monetization.

I'm guessing you haven't had the new site rolled out to you yet? Maybe it's just me but on the mobile version of the new site, of the top four posts one to three(!) are ads on every page. Oh, and only two posts are visible by default. I much preferred the unobtrusiveness of their ads previously.

I find myself wishing the new ads were more intrusive! What we have taught them is that we are "okay" with ads as long as they're unintrusive. But what Reddit has understood is that if they can blend in the ads seamlessly that the ads are acceptable. But the ads are actually worse. -- And thank goodness for that. I waste far too much time there and nothing breaks me from the spell like loading the new theme.

i can no longer login with the new page, because they've introduced a client-side password check that fails for my legacy account.

right now, i'm still able to authenticate at old.reddit.com... but once they've deprecated that as well, i'll no longer be able to authenticate unless i change my password in this grace period. not doing that though

I stopped using it when they effectively prevented browsing from phones. I'm to lazy to switch to desktop view. I don't want to install their crap app on my primary device.

I don't understand why wouldn't you change your password? Is there some technical or security related reason?

no, i'm just not interested enough to keep my reddit account active. I'll use that as an excuse to stop going there altogether

I'm sure he's getting more than a million dollars though...

It's almost as if they realised hosting millions of images and hiring developers costs money! What a shock!

Initially it was a one-man operation that relied on donations from fellow Reddit users. I guess the donations eventually dried up or at least stopped covering the ever-increasing bandwidth costs.

Right on! They are at the final bastion -- continue saying "no" to being bought by Facebook, FB is plastering them with ads continuously. I say 90% of ads I see on the site is FB luring me into "see what my friends are doing".

Wonder how much before enough money is enough money.

Yeah, you will have a hard time finding an image host that doesn't shove tons of advertisements down your throat. But at the same time, most of them are hosting a ton of recycled memes. Nothing of value.

I'm currently test driving https://www.imagesocket.com (for personal photos) if anybody else is looking for a viable alternative.

A lot of those memes are probably the same image. Would it be possible for Imgur to remove duplicate images and just redirect users to the original? That might help save bandwidth.

Deduplication would save storage space, but won’t do anything for bandwidth; if you redirect users to an existing image they’re still going to download it and you’re still going to use up some bandwidth.