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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

The whisper founders threatened to default on the debt they raised from SVB, then used inside money to buy it at cents on the dollar. because debt is senior to equity, they then wiped out the equity raised and kicked sequoia, shasta, and lightspeed off the board. then raised PE to fund a series of purchases of apps such as kik, and a lot of android apps with churned users with always-on location permissions turned on. They then used that data to build a small ad network.

Darknet Diaries episode on Kik messenger has some background on Medianet https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/

I thought exactly the same.

It doesn't bode well for Imgur future. They don't care about their acquisition. It's to wonder why are they doing it in the first place.

The company doesn't have any public information either. All I can find is a LONG list of job openings: https://jobs.lever.co/medialab

Weird list if they are just "investors".

That exactly the first thought that came to my mind as well. RIP Imgur? It doesn't seem like medialab is anything more than the 'internet brand' version of a patent troll.

To buy old, dilapidated tech/media brands that no longer have any ability to get pay out investors (who are happy to sell on the cheap for a write-off), but still get some level of traffic. Bundle all the traffic together to sell ads across a network of sites with the hopes of profiting.

It’s a strategy as old as time. Sometimes it works (IAC, is arguably a good example of a company who has bought or funded companies at various stages of distress/hype (and incubated some that are very successful in their own right, like Match Group) and managed to get goodish CPMs across the sites they bundle together), most of the time it doesn’t. But the goal is to acquire the brand/traffic, cut costs to the bone, and attempt to profit off the traffic by selling ads or user data or whatever. It’s a rollup play and the goal is definitely not to invest back into the companies themselves any more than they need to run.

To be the biggest media company of 2014.

Yeah to be an ad network like everything else

Based on this episode of Darknet Diaries: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/ It sounds like they buy up dead/dying online properties, fire basically everyone, put the service on life support to keep it barely functioning, milk all the money they can from the remaining users as the service goes to shit, buy something else.

To become the next Yahoo.

HN contains enough people of different vintage and background that it would be rather more surprising if there was any subject that we all agreed on. This has nothing to do with cognitive dissonance, which is something unique to an individual, at best you could conclude that HN is able to cater to people on opposing sides of some spectra without turning into a hate fest.

I find it amusing that people think of "the HN community" as a singular mind or something

Different people respond to different things

It depends on when they sell and who too. If you create a neat startup and sell for a lot to a respectable company then it’s praised but if you sell to a sketchy company (like this) long after your prime it’s looked down on

doublethink*

CD would be us being uncomfortable with the conflict and possibly resolving it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

Well, why change a formula that leads to an exit.

abandoned*

They stopped being just an image host and attempted to branch out. Except the content creators just post the garbage to reddit and tiktok directly because the reach is much greater than linking to imgur from the various platforms.

it use to be my fav time waster app rather than the selfies on IG or silly politics on FB. but yea rarely use it now so I guess engagement is dropping

Imgur was a wonderful idea, but I think they forgot to have a business plan. Imgur is absolutely terrible these days.

The Imgur community is almost completely toxic. Imgur apparently care about my privacy, but still want to share information with 1200 different "partners". It's also the most effective way of draining the battery of any device you use. Even the new M1 MacBooks will burn through battery like there's no tomorrow if you load the Imgur website in Safari, or worse any other browser.

It's not a great site and haven't been for years.

Imgur does this weird thing on mobile where it will always redirect you to some page where it can then nag you to download their app with grayouts, big buttons, and then a content feed they hope you scroll down on.

It also downloads like 6 megabytes worth of local content. Doesn't matter if you are going to the imgur page of the image, or literally the URI to the image file itself.

Yes, MediaLab needs more sunshine. Kik has major issues..

Same as Imgur. The current image hosting sites suck and you know you can do better

Then it works and you need to pay the bills

10 years later you sell it and some new guy makes one

add ads to pictures... that's what everyone else is doing

Hosting companies selling 3 years for $150 of traditional PHP shared hosting are still around. I love how skills I learned 15 years ago still work on these and it feels closer to the older web. Probably can run Perl on them! Also a PHP file on one of these is close to “serverless” - it’s a lot simpler doesn’t change its UI and API every 5 minutes like Azure

Yes

Storage is cheap. Bandwidth is usually the killer.

Well, one (semi-)frequent use case for me would be creating some graphic (e.g. a chart or a UI suggestion) that I would share in some community (e.g. forum). Unlikely anyone looks at them again a decade later, but those embeds will still rot away...

That is an incredibly narrow view of what imgur is used for. Over on the Something Awful forums there is a _ton_ of amazing content with all of the images hosted on Imgur. Stuff like woodworking and other craft blogs, video game playthroughs, collection photographs, musical instruments... I'm sure many other online communities use it for the same purpose. When imgur dies (this announcement is a very loud death knell) it's going to be a huge, huge loss.

Tons of amazing one-off blog posts told with images as the focus has been posted through Imgur.

Things like “how I renovated my house” or “how the circuitry of this gadget works” told through pictures with supporting texts lives solely on Imgur.

If you don’t mind how did you arrive at this figure? It’s $5000 per month right

It's possible to create a 400 TiB storage server for $5000?

To save others looking it up: `.la` is the ccTLD of Laos. They're using it here to mean "Los Angeles", of course, but I hadn't seen that one before :)

According to their public Statement of Information (https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/Document/RetrievePDF?Id=04...), the CEO of MediaLab.AI Inc is Michael Heyward, the co-founder of Whisper.

Are you talking about NPM leftpad that broke Node? Is there any place where I can read more about this claim?

After reading this, it's clear everybody knows (multiple legal challenges, involvement by MS...) and nobody with actual power wants to crack down on it. Safe haven or not, when authorities want to destroy a sketchy business, they have a number of weapons at their disposal. To me, it all suggests Kik (and by extension, possibly, Medialab) might well be some sort of law-enforcement front at this point.

1/3 American Teenagers use the app according to Kik... I have a feeling they're not counting right because that doesn't sound right to me.

Just a note, we're getting close to fiscal year end (9/30) for a lot of companies. Maybe totally anecdotal but I've noticed in the past that I see a lot of these kinds of announcements this time of year presumably to get these done before the next fiscal year.

It's probably worth a lot more as a honeypot than it was before.

I'm sure there's good reasons for this. but I'd be curious for details.

I wonder if Reddit would be what it is today without imgur. I started using Reddit shortly before imgur launched, and I can still remember the day that it went live. It was by far the best image uploading experience I'd ever had, and I'd used most (maybe every) major uploader that came before them, between 1995 and 2009.

To be fair, the Imgur comments are actually pretty funny

Imgur comments have the old twitter length limit, 140 characters.

IIRC at the time imgur launched, all of the other free image sharing websites were pretty bad. Reddit itself didn't start allowing uploads until long after imgur.

> They began on Reddit because Reddit was incapable of handling image uploads.

I'd argue they largely still are incapable of handling image uploads. Their gallery system sucks and the redesign just makes it harder to even see what was posted.

Reddit forwards /r/imgur to /r/drugs

My dad worked in M&A for a long time and handled the sale of a plastic molding company where the owner was getting quite old and couldn't really run the business anymore. The company was extremely well established and had a very strong and loyal customer base and ran off a single manufacturing facility in a small town out in the boonies. The owner certainly wanted a fair value for the company but he also strongly desired that the plant be kept open and employees retain their positions. Adding this sort of a restriction on a company you're selling is possible - but it is hellishly expensive, generally you're considering adding some sort of third party oversight and auditing for all HR actions and business decisions. If you buy a company under these terms you can end up utterly destroying the company if supply chains shift - the local labour pool is unsustainable or a plethora of other reasons... And almost certainly this burden is mandatorily bundled with the company - so once you've rode the company value down a bit and are looking to get out all of the buyers will know how much of an impossible situation that company is in.

At the end of the day when you sell a company you are divorcing yourself from the future direction - you might be invited to stay on as an executive - and the new owners might listen to you... or they might not - that's entirely up to them. Any promises or commitments you've made as an executive are only as good as your word - and when you sell your company your word stops having any power (because you sold that power).

I would never shame someone who wanted to keep an ideal going from making an exit they personally need to make - always prioritize your health and happiness over any venture - but when you sell you're accepting the fact that at any moment the buyer may completely reverse the direction of the company.

Can you think of a notable example when they weren’t?

Not everyone, but it’s definitely rare. Feels good to believe that everyone sells out though when you’re in the process of selling out.

You don't need to sell out if you can create a service or product that people are willing to pay money for - even indirectly. Granted, this is certainly a difficult feat to pull on a free image hosting site.

Hmm, as far as I can see you either sell out, or get sold out to. The last one seems like a viable option?