There's some money on it, but not enough to get rich. For example, Imgur was profitable in 2014, but they had to raise money and expand...

Maybe a service like this should start with ads and paid plans (that unlock restrictions), keep their running costs low, and never stop being an image hosting site?

Too many start without ads, get users and some investment and then spend it all on expensive AWS hosting/CDN bills and employees that are hired to create a social media platform... and then they stop being an image hosting website, fill the site with ads, focus too much on growth, and so on. I don't blame them for taking a big pay check, but I don't think the entrepreneur type works well for image hosting.

Just sell peoples IP adresses and browser fingerprints and what they were looking at in text format

I hope this is sarcasm. Please do not do this. The world is crappy enough as is, no need for more spam and more privacy loss to keep an image site afloat.

It's cute that you think this doesn't happen already.

The problem is that it's just not that profitable. What is an advertiser going to do, with the knowledge that internet people like to look at cats?

sell them cat food?

When did I ever say that? Perhaps you should re-read what I wrote.

I was stating we have enough of it as is. No need to be snarky when you couldn’t be bothered to read. Of course it exists, what kind of troglodyte do you take me as, sir?!

> Imgur was profitable in 2014, but they had to raise money and expand...

Why did they "have" to raise money and expand? Maybe this was sarcasm and I missed it in which case ignore.

Coz owners wanted more money

Imgur is backed by venture capital. A stable, sustainable business isn’t enough; they have to make gobs of cash to repay their investors.

I understand the need to expand given that you have investors. I was asking why they needed to get investors if they were profitable.

Sure, it is now, but why did it have to be? I don't remember them hurting for many or anything before the VC money came in, but nobody ever accused me of being too astute.

Yes, it's a sarcastic "have".

Got it. I would've written it like:

They were profitable but then they haaaaad to go and raise money.

:-)

I'm a little surprised because in the era of CDNs, you'd think image distribution would be much easier and cheaper.

as long as there's any cost and no one else willing to support we'll have these services disappearing

that's only true because they all try to monetize by making their service obnoxious or even hostile to users.

Even if they were to insist on making their money by pushing ads, doing it in a way that doesn't degrade the service would go a long way toward keeping users around.

When I think about the massive amount of data image hosts collect, I have to imagine there should be ways to make money from that information without any impact on the user's experience uploading or viewing photos.

As far as I can tell the biggest problem image hosts have is dealing with our insane copyright laws. Users just want to share information, while companies want to act as gatekeepers and toll collectors which often leaves image hosts caught in the middle. They hold massive data sets of our collective culture and interests, but have a lot of limits on what can be done with it. Most of their content was uploaded to them in violation of copyright laws to start with.

Don’t businesses that host also have to pay for moderators that deal with removing media of abuse and other illegal content? That cannot be cheap once you are popular.