My guess is PR.

Regularly, on imgur, you see a pic in interest for a celebrity, a rich person, a movie. It looks organic, but if you look closely, there are plenty of weird things about it. Then it disappears as suddenly as it arrived.

I believe that they sell the front page to PR firms that need to promote something in a way the people think themself came up with the hype.

It's probably the same for a lot of communities with a strong influence on trends, like popular sub reddits or hacker news.

There is no better ads than the one you don't see. There is no better slogan than the one you repeat to your friends as a catchphrase. And there is no better propaganda than the one based on ideas you thought you had by yourself.

Yeah but who goes to the front page of imgur?

I one time posted an album on Imgur of my hobby project. I was hoping it would do well on the niche subreddit it involved.

It did ok on reddit (100 upvotes) but a few thousands upvotes on Imgur and made the front page with hundreds of thousands of views. I was shocked since I didn't even know that was a thing. But my guess is popular with people who are on their phone a lot, are not as tech saavy, or international.

The exact opposite personality type to people that browse HN I'd wager

I, and apparently Swizec (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28676558), do both, and I doubt we're the only ones.

Yes, there might be dozens of you.

For the uninitiated, this is a meme reference to a clip from the TV show Arrested Development, popular on Imgur as a reaction to show support for someone else who expresses a sense of loneliness in their appreciation or affection.

A version of this: https://i.imgur.com/pgXjbNy.gifv

How much could a banana cost? 10 dollars?

No there's plenty, HN just has the kind of people who need to loudly proclaim they don't engage with <insert popular thing>

That wrongly creates the impression that there are only a few HN users engaging with it.

HN and Imgur are among my favorite sites on the web!

Both sites are quite "nerdy". Each in their own way.

I used to in college. Extremely bad habit, was easy to spend 4+ hours there just hitting the right arrow.

Same. I stopped when I realised it was passively teaching me celebrity gossip, which I never wanted to know.

It's so easy to absorb 'celebrity' gossip, I always wondered if it'd be possible to do the same with say science or maths, if it was presented in the same kind of format.

I think the hardest part is the rigour. Math and science build on concepts over time, and mastery is easier with more hands-on experience. Just presenting it to someone in a feed might be waaay too passive for absorption.

Easy way to find out. Remove the pictures from celebrity gossip posts, and see how much you remember.

Somehow I’d always end up doing this most right in the middle of finals.

You can actually spend days doing that…

I recall being in high school (around 2013, 2014) and some of my classmates would browse imgur while slacking off from work. Not sure how big it is these days, but I think some people use it the same way you'd browse r/funny on reddit, or iFunny. Except there isn't really a topic, it's just images of whatever people think is interesting.

Who doesn't? It's the best source of almost everything. Perfect mix of culturally important twitter and news screenshots and entertaining gifs.

I scrolled through it for five minutes just now. Advice animals, rage-bait about politicians, political cartoons, cute animals—this is complete garbage.

Absolutely this. imgur.com is the only reason I can pretend to be "down with the kids".

Oh yes also all the good/important tiktoks end up on there. I don’t even have tiktok and am conversant in all the memes.

7/7 would recommend

If you were really an imgurian, you'd know that the correct perfect score is 5/7.

Huh wow, you weren't kidding!

I remember going on the front page of Imgur once a couple of years back and it seemed less entertaining and more rage-baity than now -- think I'll revisit that decision...

Some of the comments are sometimes quite interesting. Sometimes they're even brilliantly witty.

The way some of the replies talk about the front page of imgur (huge time sink, insightful, entertaining, keeps you in the loop) is the same way I'd talk about the FYP on tiktok.

Plenty of people, overwhelmingly men[1].

Make no mistake, Imgur is a social network. It has its own memes, regular posting themes, and users recognised by the community[2].

[1]: They are (were?) proud of that and bragged about it in a page describing themselves.

[2]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/anewbadlyphotoshoppedphotoofm...

People that subscribe to default subreddits and click the Youtube "Featured" section.

I only now learned that it has such a thing and decided to see it, and I am very confused by the lack of advertisement on it indeed.

People who want to find memes to repost on their social media.

My retired father?

you're forced there if you want to upload something

But who are these companies that successfully provide this service?

It's just an educated guess, so I don't know.

Besides, such company would do its best to stay discrete, by design.

I'm aware of one such company that uses Imgur like that and that deals with celebs. Imgur isn't their primary target, it's just a handy layer of abstraction away from the real target so the content can't TRULY be taken down on the target site. Plus, it shows you how many impressions you get for free. That way they can gather up their campaign image urls and views at the end of the contract and show hard results without the need for a fancy, paid analytics dashboard or campaign tracking system.

It seemed crazy to me, and I didn't want to be the product, so I made https://imgz.org/. Maybe you'll like it.

Your pricing page is a delight

https://imgz.org/money/

> Paying us money doesn't entitle you to anything except owning less money

Brilliant

Even the terms are great.

"Where was I"

https://imgz.org/help/terms/

Maybe charge $1/month for MVP sarcasm.

It looked interesting at first but now I'm confused, is this a joke project?

Yes and no.

Agreed. It's delightfully funny without going overboard, or being too cheesy like most bigger companies who try to be cheeky.

I'm signing up.

The trick is to actually not care about whether people buy your stuff! Hard to pull off when you're trying to make money, but easy for me.

While that may be true, you actually seem to have genuine talent for comedy. I'm inclined to pay for IMGZ for that reason alone, even though I may never really use it.

My favorite kind of user <3

I pay for SourceHut, not because i get a lot of value from the service, but as a way of funding Drew DeVault's crazy ranting.

It is quite great, I agree.

But in all seriousness, so you have an actual privacy policy and such? I like the pricing and do have images I need to host!

No, unfortunately not. I can give you an informal one, that I will not sell/give away/etc your data, won't track you, etc. I also only use CloudFlare, so your data only goes through them.

If your site ever get hacked, we will never know if its your sarcasm OR it is truly hacked :)

Browsing imgz felt like watching a fun movie, I love the architecture too ( ... we dont have this...LOL )

BTW, I am (Maybe I should say WE are) also building a image hosting service. https://host.pics (Pre-Alpha)

Haha, thank you!

Now pay.

You sir, gave me a good laugh. Kudos.

I would have giggled slightly more if you had "MOST POPULAR" instead of "OUR CHOICE" on the "BUY THE SITE" option.

The fact that "Our Choice" is also definitely true though made me laugh a second time.

> The server doesn't have that much space don't get this

Oh Em Eff Gee xD xD xD

This website is great, I have no use for an image sharing site but in tempted to sign up just to help see it become successful. And behind all the humor there is actually a very sensible concept: pay a reasonable amount of money to get an actual service and not some ad infested crap. Also I love

> If you're expecting professionalism, call Oracle and ask for a quote of Oracle Advanced Image Sharing for Hadoop or whatever crap they sell

I'm dying. It is a gift that keeps on giving. The blog has me in tears.

That architecture.

https://imgz.org/i9hxfgRu-1280.png

Cloudflare Free Caching, T2, the only thing we have and it is not even on AWS.

This is one of the greatest pieces of website comedy I have ever seen.

> Let's talk money. As you may have noticed from the subtle but effective messaging, this service isn't free. That's because we want to avoid having to sell photos of your vagina to shady Russian oligarchs to pay for our servers and cocaine.

You weren't kidding. Amazing.

Thanks! Check out the blog, we're innovating.

Your architecture page is an inspiration to me.

Would you like a job maintaining our Hadoop cluster? We pay per node.

I would make you guys sooo distributed.

The meme marketing is funny, but the meme license is less so. Would you consider using a more well-known and established license? The Parity license looks like Open Source/Free Software, but it also looks very vague and difficult to interpret, and has not been evaluated by the OSI or FSF, which makes it needlessly difficult to comply with, or to do things like make packages or contributions or derivative works. If you want copyleft, consider the GPL family, or MPL?

I didn't mean it as a meme license, but I might change it to something like the GPL 3 or AGPL, thanks!

Cheers!

We feel personally attacked at our startup by some of the stuff you wrote on your blog especially the thing about writing in plural

I love your marketing patter! Cracking up reading some of this.

If I end up stealing your style for something, I owe you a beer.

If you steal my style, I'm coming for you.

Great! Now I don't have to worry about how I'm getting that beer to you.

> We have CDNs and Rust and all that fast crap.

Lol! Haven't used the service, but the website is fun.

The marketing style reminds me of the people offering to pirate their VST Plugins right form their web-site if you don't want to pay.

The plugins and the web-site are also crazy as shit! Take a look:

https://freakshowindustries.com/

I love this. The "steal" button is inspired, wow.

In case you didn't see it: They explain the reasoning behind the "steal button" in the FAQ and on the About page.

I saw that, I love their reasoning.

True art. Like your project! :-)

Love stuff like that. Thanks again for making me smile. I appreciate that.

This is fucking cool!

I emailed one of them 12 years and 4 months ago to ask how they paid for everything. This was back in 2009 when the internet was still small enough that companies would respond to random emails. They responded to say they had funding covered. They shut down a few years later.

The domain is there, but it just says "ImageHost.org is closed" with a Google Analytics tag.

> But I always wondered how any of these random image hosts afforded bandwidth ... reminds of the other various ones like TwitPic who was saved from being taken offline by Twitter

Image hosting is relatively cheap, so you can have good margins if you can get a lot of use and fill the ad inventory. The way you do it, is by running as thin of an operation as possible.

When the first wave of one-click image hosts were popping up back in 2004-2005 roughly, I noticed one called ImageVenue. The founder, Vlad, was out of Eastern Europe somewhere. I emailed him and bought advertising, the price was right and he had a lot of impressions to fill. Back then he was just buying tons of $40/month dedicated servers from one specific host, using a img7.imagevenue.com scheme for each machine, and filling up the boxes. You can still use ImageVenue.com 17 years later, even though the traffic for the service has never been what it was during the early peak years (tons of image hosting competition swamped the market). I had a running dialogue with Vlad across about a year, he also mentioned in discussing Ajax (early popularity days for Ajax) use at the time, that he wasn't familiar with it and was "only really good with C++ and PHP". So I assume some of it was built in PHP. He was managing ads in-house, where he handled each sale by email, negotiating impressions and duration each month.

And regarding TwitPic, circa 2010: "TwitPic is generating $1.5 to $2 million in ad sales on an annual basis, with 70% profit margins, says its founder Noah Everett"

https://mixergy.com/interviews/twitpic-noah-everett/

Now that's a name I haven't heard in a while. Yes, funny story, Twitter at that time was threatening to cut off our API access due to us trying to trademark "Twitpic". We had been in the process of trying to trademark our name for many years prior. Our initial application hit tons of hurdles with other Twit* marks (my fault for filing late). Fast forward about 4 years after we'd finally worked through all the issues which required us to file a whole new trademark application and this one ran afoul (pun intended) of Twitter's legal. I assume that in 2009'ish when we originally filed, Twitter either didn't care then or we weren't big enough to be a threat, but I guess that changed in 2014.

Long story long, I basically ended up giving Twitpic to Twitter (I wanted the photos to live on). We were already feeling the squeeze from their own native image feature plus some other compounding events like Google Adsense banning us out-of-the-blue with no recourse that really affected our margins [Hey Google, you still owe us $100k+ ;)].

It was one of the best, most educating times of my life. Just thankful I had that opportunity to run Twitpic for those years, God blessed me.

The End.

P.S. I'm still tinkering https://ark.fm

Thanks for popping on. A legendary time back then. And ultimately I'm glad that Twitter kept the photos living on as preservation is so important. But man, any insights into the bandwidth imgur must incur to maintain things? They are similar in that for a time they were the defacto image host capability for reddit before reddit rolled its own.

I imagine Imgur now is many times bigger than we were. If I remember correctly around 2009/2010 our Amazon rep said Twitpic accounted for about 1% of data stored in S3 at that time and I think our cost was around $100k/month. We eventually got that down to $60k'ish when they gave us "special" pricing and later on we put bare-metal caching servers in front of it to store/serve hot images which further decreased it.

Disclaimer: Hopefully I'm remembering correctly, it's been a while!

I don't think it's a big mystery. Bandwidth and ad revenue scale together. Sometimes the image will be embedded, hot linked or the request is otherwise not monetizable, but you can assume that those are a fixed fraction. Every image clicked on otherwise will generate some ad revenue which is multiples of the bandwidth cost of serving it.

Anecdotal and I can't substantiate any of this. About 5 years ago my old boss's wife worked for imgur and it did not sound great. They had constant churn. She was an upper manager of some sort and even she left after a short time. From what I understood, the company was not profitable and like many other tech companies relied heavily on investor.

I seriously doubt their community can sustain the costs of the service. In fact, the quality of imgur's service has declined in an effort to make profit. For instance, all images are compressed now. That used to not be true.

Most platforms you are using today cannot survive without ad's, because their business model is not one that can make a profit without a monopoly first.

You can shop around for bandwidth even if you're a small shop. I run https://filepost.io. It lets you share large files and images. It is profitable with ads alone.

took a look at it, nicely implemented resumable uploads/downloads... very smooth.

i notice youre using cloudflare to deliver the files on the download side, and im guessing you are taking advantage of bandwidth alliance so ingress/egress are basically free - i always thought the biggest cost for something like this would be the storage, eg if you are letting people send unlimited <5GB files for free, and each of those last for 10 days on what im assuming is some kind of object storage/s3-like thing, surely you are paying a fortune in $/GB/month, even if its pro-rated to 1/3 the amount since the files only live 1/3 a month?

I think there's a cost to taking money from thousands of people vs taking the money from an investor or advertiser.

First off there is tax compliance, if you want to be global it will cost a lot for accountants and lawyers that understand how this should work "anywhere" in the world.

Second, I know some people that will just cancel credit cards because they don't want to make the next recurring payment for a service. Coming after these people is not worth the effort but hurts the bottom line.

Third, you need to hire employees to look after customer accounts and billing if there are any questions.

I think there's other reasons and I know payment processors like Stripe and Square are attempting to make this seamless, but I'm guessing a single source of funding is still desirable.

Bandwidth is pretty cheap if you look beyond cloud. There are providers that offer magnitudes cheaper bandwidth than e.g. AWS but you have to set servers yourself.

If I request one of the images in the post, I end up on a Fastly IP, and their public pricing[1] is pretty much the same price per GB as AWS[2]. They probably get a discount there, but that's probably about the same deal if you're a big AWS customer.

[1]: https://www.fastly.com/pricing/ [2]: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/?nc1=h_ls

absolutely not. I don't use fastly, but i pay 1/10th the rate of AWS and co.

Scaleway, OVH will get you that, but at a larger scale just rent bare metal.

At their scale, nothing is cheap. Some things are cheaper than others, but even the cheapest option must be costing a fortune each month.

Right, it's the scale and seemingly limitless ceiling.... seems crazy. Obviously there's a lot of low res tiny images on there etc but there's also not -- and for years and years?

I remember back around 2009(?) ish I had a chance to talk to some folks at Justin.tv (now twitch) and they said one ad on the stream every few hours more than covers all the costs. What changed?

I guess the videos are much more high resolution now than the webcam size 320x240 videos back then but has cost gone up that much?

Ads are worth a magnitude less today than they were in 2009.

What? They're crazy competitive these days. Every popular ad space online has been bought by the highest bidder. AdWords, Facebook, Imgur, Reddit, companies are dumping cash like mad. The market grew by billions over the past decade.

The ad market basically bifurcated. It's a land of the haves and have nots

The big ad platforms like Facebook and Google have thrived, of course. And as platforms like Snapchat have aged they've gradually improved the rates they're getting for their ad space (a typical process).

The scale of online advertising today isn't because the industry's median or average CPMs went up 100 fold. The volume went up dramatically over the last 10-15 years with the traffic for the big services. The big advertisers brought billion dollar ad budgets online and handed them to Facebook, not to one-click image hosts.

Your typical one-click image host is not going to command better ad rates today vs 15 years ago. It's a worse context than it was back then, actually. Back then advertisers were relatively stupid when it came to online advertising, today they're a lot more sophisticated, and a lot more strict about where they place ads (eg porn on one-click image hosts is a big problem for advertisers). The big, rich platforms like Facebook eat a large share of the high paying advertising. What's left for something like a one-click image host, is very, very low paying ads that you have to run a trillion of to make money.

I used to work for a company in a niche industry that used to clear 7 figures a year using the online platform I put together back in its heyday. And while traffic isn't quite as good as it used to be, it's still at about 70%. Their ad revenue is today about 1/8th of what they were making back in 2011-2015ish, and they basically have zero dedicated staff to the platform. I just do some maintenance and bug fixes for them every month.

Sorry, was confusing.

Ads cost a lot more. People who rent space get a lot less.

But you need to consider that so have hosting costs-- proportionately too. Hosting data was incredibly expensive 10 years ago. If the math was working then, it should at least be pretty close to working now.

For some segments that's true. Image hosting wasn't incredibly expensive 10 years ago. It was very much on the lighter side in cost compared to MegaUpload or YouTube type services.

Image file sizes increasing dramatically as smartphones started producing photo sizes that would have been considered massive 15 years ago, saturated much of the gains in cost to hardware.

It's easier to run a one-click image host (like the early Imgur) as a solo operator today versus back then. It's not much cheaper when you account for the larger image files (unless you severely limit the file size, which won't be a popular choice with users, most of which just blast four billion smartphone photos, don't think much about image sizes, and want to upload them as is without thinking about any of that).

Bandwidth is a heck of a lot cheaper these days (I remember a previous employer paying $10k/mo for a 100MB circuit in San Francisco 10ish years ago). That said while the prices are much lower, people are realizing that not all bandwidth is created equal, e.g to get good connectivity to some regions can still be ludicrously expensive, for example if you want to deliver to Singapore, Australia, etc, or say you wait to get content from the USA to South America with reasonable reliability and low latency.

I think a lot of tech companies meet the fate where they get diminishing returns on growth and have to keep hiring and spending a lot of cash to chase smaller and smaller gains. Bandwidth is expensive but having thousands of highly compensated employees is also very expensive, probably more so.

Where have you had success with hosting outside the usual aws/gap/etc? It seems like digital ocean has a bit cheaper bandwidth, but curious if you have a better recommendation!

Anywhere you rent bare metal. Cloud hosting providers always had the worst bandwidth prices, I'm not joking.

Buy a server or 10, host in equinix, buy bulk bandwidth. Amortize cost.

My preferred server provider would set you up with a linux machine with SSD with 20TB of transfer on a gigabit port for $130/month and another 100TB on a gigabit port for $79/month

DataPacket has a lot of locations globally (compared to Hetzner), though you're going to need to spend more than a few dollars to get started.

Not only to get started. What costs me €20 on hetzner costs me $800 on DataPacket.

That’s quite a difference.

Right, it's not a 'side project' type of vendor, more of an Imgur scale vendor. I love Hetzner, I just wish they had more locations than Germany and Finland, which are practically the same in terms of latency if you/your users are from Asia or the Americas.

Hetzner or OVH.

Try OVH

A couple of friends of mine are the co-founders of one of the big gif sharing sites. I've heard some pretty interesting, and very funny, stories about the sticker shock on S3 as they grew. But it sounds like Amazon has been fairly flexible and provided some decent leeway with respect to giving grace periods as investment rounds closed.

Imgur for a while had a hugely active Imgur base AFAIK. Folks who just went on Imgur, did things on Imgur, and added to Imgur. That was a meta layer on top of Reddit. The issue was most of those people wouldn’t pay for Imgur storage, and didn’t view Imgur ads

Their community now though not the size of reddit would be comparable to something like 9gag or ifunny, arguably larger. It's become it's own thing separate from reddit now.

Storage is dirt cheap these days.