It's really unfortunate that Imgur took such a turn for the worse.
Originally it seemed like Imgur was a benevolent gift to Reddit users... a clean, simple, easy to use image hosting service that everyone could use for free. I guess it was too good to be true, because now it's tricky to link to a direct image (though not impossible), and the standard landing page is filled with unnecessary clutter.
As an aside: if you're looking for an amusing read, the "IgnorantImgur" subreddit[0] is filled with examples of people from the Imgur community who seem to be oblivious to Imgur's origin as an image hosting site for Reddit users.
What really killed them was the GIF explosion. Average image size remains largely static and bandwidth and storage costs steadily decline so if you get your timing exactly right, you can hit that sweet spot where your CPM declines slower than your hosting costs and provide an increasingly profitable business.
However, GIFs completely upended that calculation by increasing the average file size by an order of magnitude and pushed the viability of a cruft free image host further down the road by another few years.
Frankly, I'm surprised Google never just bought imgur and absorbed it under youtube or something. Being the default place on the web to host images seems like something way more strategically valuable to Google than any standalone image host.
Imageshack was in the same position 5 years ago. And Photobucket 3 years before that. Image hosts go through a cycle of upending the tyrant and then becoming the villain.
Ugh. Don’t remind me. I used yfrog (Imageshack’s Twitter-friendly brand) for years, and now I have probably hundreds of old tweets with missing images.
Creating communities is hard, but Google wants a unified 'Google' community, not multiple disparate ones -- just look at how they handled YouTube.
Even if you throw in some machine learning to figure out if the user's looking at memes or gifs or porn, I can't imagine the marginal value of that data being of use to Google. It's essentially unmonetizable, which is why most image hosts disappear after a few years.
Imgur was successful in avoiding that fate by pivoting to a community, but that community would be of no use to someone like Google.
A guess: (and note they kept youtube a wholly owned subsidiary I think) they desperately had to make sure the Viacom lawsuit defense was well funded and aggressively defended or it would severely damage Google's business.
Also, google has now had success building photo sites / photo products, but at the time of the youtube purchase, hadn't had much success building a video product.
Are you trying to imply that Youtube is a monopoly? Aren't there others like vimeo, etc.? Besides, there is nothing from technology perspective to make it a monopoly. All you need is a server rack and a bunch of web developers who can build such a site, right?
Well, there's also massive scaling, which the average web developer isn't experienced with. Then there's creating a consistent experience across various devices and browsers.
So, sure, anyway halfway competent developer could bang out a YouTube (or Facebook, etc) prototype in a few weeks, but going from there to a reliable, usable service at scale is something else altogether.
You're going to need some project managers, SREs, sysadmins, front and back end web developers, programmers who know about video encoding, content experts, lawyers, etc...
Youtube is a monopoly in a way Google is a monopoly. Just like how there's Bing and DuckDuckGo but most people use Google, most people use Youtube although some do use sites like vimeo. If you think it's so easy to build a site that competes with Google or Youtube you should go ahead and build one and overtake them. After all, nowadays everything is open sourced, you can even build your own search engine from scratch overnight.
Does anyone know if it was specifically the community/userbase that enticed Google, or was there some technical aspects to YouTube that Google couldn't or didn't want to build themselves?
Contemporary media coverage suggests they wanted to buy out a competitor which became the dominant video site in a year. This New York Times article [1] from 2006 wrote:
"The acquisition of the privately held YouTube will enable Google to thrive in one area of the Internet where it has so far failed to gain footing. According to Hitwise, which monitors Web traffic, [YouTube] has the lion's share of online video traffic (...) a 46 percent share, MySpace has 23 percent and Google Video has 10 percent."
Meanwhile, this 2006 article from the Economist [2] stated:
"the deal is 'an aggressive, mature move for Google, one that shows that senior management is not too proud or stubborn to see that they can't build everything themselves,' says Henry Blodget, an analyst at Cherry Hill Research. Indeed, Google's Mr Schmidt freely conceded that YouTube is the 'clear winner', especially in creating social networks around its site."
> was there some technical aspects to YouTube that Google couldn't or didn't want to build themselves?
Google had very much the power of building a YouTube-like community themselves, but buying out a competitor is a short-cut since it has the positive side-effect of removing that competition in our business. After buying YouTube, Google didn't have to waste time in building a community around a new product or "converting" the YouTube masses to theirs.
This short-cut way of acquisition is nowadays preferred by large companies rather than risk everything by doing innovation and "real" competition.
If I remember google video was superior in video quality and looser limitations, it was a place where you could commonly find full documentaries while youtube still had a 11 minute video limit. It was actually google acquiring youtube that caused youtube to loosen their limitations and go for HD. I doubt they bought it for any technical reasons, google's infrastructure was already superior.
Google knew that Youtube will turn into the largest video search engine, so they bought it strategically. Otherwise someone else could have swooped in and acquired the largest video search site, which would have left Google vulnerable in many ways.
Summary: userbase/community was what drove the network effect, which made it impossible for Google to catch up, and that's why Google made the decision to purchase Youtube.
But most of imgur's audience is not even seeing the site or is just looking at a quick picture and then going back to reddit or some other referring site.
I think you're mistaken here. As a reddit user you might think that, but there's actually a fully functional imgur community that votes on images independently from reddit and comments on them on imgur independent from reddit.
Parent said "most of", and I think that's pretty much correct regardless of how vibrant of a community Imgur has. Most traffic to imgur is via embeds or links from another discussion forums. The former case obviously provides no exposure to Imgur community, and even in the latter case most people are there only to look at the picture, not to engage as an Imgur community member.
The whole point of this discussion thread is that Imgur is f*ed because they aren't independent enough. Otherwise there's nothing to worry about, right?
Imgur is exactly as much of a commodity as YouTube. The exception is that they host images instead, and when you consider that the images are silent webm videos a lot of the time, the lines are even more blurry. The value to both communities is just that, their communities.
Agreed; whilst there are some subcommunities that appear unscathed, YouTube comments are typically a cesspool of hurtful spew from the bottom feeders of human society.
> Imgur is exactly as much of a commodity as YouTube
Youtube isn't a commodity. It's the place that even your aunt, mother, grandmother, uncle will visit and knows to visit for entertainment or music. People who would never have a reason to visit imgur.
Commodity is when your product has no differentiation on the market. Imgur does not have enough differentiation on the market and that's why they're a commodity. For image centric community you can go to Reddit, Tumblr, or any kind of online forums really. Youtube's differentiation is that it has created significant network effect around public video hosting. Can you think of any meaningful competition other than Vimeo? (Or maybe a couple of others but they're nowhere as close as all the online forums online)
Sex. Corporations tend to keep faaar away from everything related to porn, and a fair share of imgur images is nsfw content. Cleaning it up would be more trouble than it's worth.
> Corporations tend to keep faaar away from everything related to porn
Yahoo's purchase of Tumblr and many bids for SnapChat seem to be evidence to the contrary. Cable companies and premium channels also make a lot off of porn.
Porn is fine for large companies as long as they have some cover (the product isn't just porn).
Some nudie pics or vanilla porn would probably be the least of their worries. I can imagine that a service like imgur spends the bulk of their time cleaning up the nastier bits that inevitably creep their way into such a large site. How many companies really want to inherit a high maintenance mess for such little return? At least with Tumblr and Snapchat you have a strong brand. How many average Internet users outside of Reddit (or the 18-34 male demographic) have even heard of imgur?
Imgur started off as a benevolent gift to Reddit users, but then as more and more people started to use it, the expenses became too great to keep it the way it was. There is no money in serving images directly with no advertising, but there is certainly costs. What were they supposed to do?
This is cyclical, an image site gains critical mass, builds in size and then buckles under the weight of providing a free, clean, high-bandwidth service.
It was posted to both Digg and Reddit on the same day. The Digg post never gained any traction and when the server went down under the load MrGrimm deleted the reddit post (but not the digg post, since it gained no traction).
Citation? My recollection is that imgur didn't show up until after the Digg exodus and happened on Reddit first, but maybe I just didn't see the Digg side of it.
In 2014, I wrote a blog post (http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/moved-temporarily/) calling out Imgur's shady redirect practices on Facebook/Twitter, with a warning that things will get chaotic if they try that tactic on Reddit. Guess I was right?
Notably, when that post was submitted to Reddit, it got eviscerated, nothing that "hey, they provide a service for free, they deserve ad revenue!"
This was the reason why I created http://img42.com. They bombard you with ads, and other "features". I wanted something where I could just click, drag and drop, or pate and it would be uploaded.
> I got fed up with all the other image hosts out there so I made my own. It doesn't force you to compress your images, and it has neat things like crop, resize, rotate, and compression from 10-100. It's my gift to you. Let's not see anymore imageshack/photobucket around here ;)
I'll be listening if anyone has some suggestions.
EDIT: The server was moved off of shared hosting after about 4 hours of release. It's now on a dedicated server with a 100mb port.
EDIT2: This is an old post and it's no longer on just one 1 dedicated server. It's on many, and utilizes a CDN provided by Voxel.
This was the original post [0] announcing the creation of imgur 7 years ago. Maybe in 7 years from now you have your own img42 image hosting emporium! :)
I have been hosting img42 off a $5 a mo/ droplet :P. It has served XXm+ impressions, and 1m uploads since its creation. I also have been sustaining a ~3m a day DDOS from Russia for about a year now.
"easy temporary image hosting" - How long do images last before being removed?
It was actually that drawback that lead me to making/using my own image host! With my own host, files that were uploaded back in 2012 when it first started working are still there - with the same URL (despite URL scheme changing since then)
I have long overdue v2v2 (killed the original v2) update for the UI. I'll try to post it on HN when I complete it. The UI you see now was done in 2012.
Well they took a bunch of VC money so they could have a nice office in the middle of San Francisco and presumably so the founder could cash in a little bit. You can't blame him for his choice to take VC money, but this was inevitable.
EDIT: It's actually worse if you read their wiki [1]. They were profitable enough early on to have 10 employees AND move to San Francisco, going as far to win a "best bootstrapped start-up award". THEN they took 40 million in funding.
> a clean, simple, easy to use image hosting service that everyone could use for free
How do you monetize such a site without bloating into the current Imgur?
It seems like the only way to have a "clean, simple, easy" image hosting service is to be a billionaire and to do it out of the goodness of your heart.
That's what the lore tells us, but maybe it's just plain wrong and the old incumbents were just greedy and terrible. I think imgur was bootstrapped for a long time and didn't have much in the way of monetization, certainly hotlinking still worked then.
Hi! I'll admit it's poorly worded. My intention was to say there was an economic value in providing less-than-cost (or even free -- only you and your accountants knew) bandwidth in order to scale out your network and increase value to customers paying much more.
though not as often today as in times past, there are points where 10Gbps is more expensive overall than 20 or 30Gbps.
Getting high traffic customers like Imgur allowed us to negotiate better commits, establish new peering and interconnection agreements, and otherwise lower the "unit costs" of the network we built.
It was generally never worth it to do this for free, but you're spot on that in certain cases it was worth it to do it for less than (current) per unit costs.
Oh wow you guys re-branded. You could do with a landing page knocking about somewhere mentioning your old name! I was trying to dig through the web fairly recently trying to find you (Knowing you'd survived hosting imgur for at least a time!)
I guess traffic gets a lot cheaper beyond a certain volume. I suspect it's dollars/TB to cents/TB? So they can cut prices for their offerings and have more revenue and growth due to paying less for the traffic. Having these volumes of data also allows them to approach potential clients with some solid data (e.g. we serve 1/5 of image clicks on the net every day and below 20ms response time... I have no data, just speculation)
I could imagine that imgur traffic paid for itself.
I send 5Gbps to an eyeball network (let's say Comcast, for the sake of discussion) it might cost me $5000/month to do that through my transit provider (intentionally inflated cost). Comcast will interconnect, settlement free, to networks who exchange 7 or more Gbps. Three optics and three cross connects are $3000 + $600/month.
How much is that additional 2Gbps of traffic (to Comcast) worth?
There was also a muddy middle when Reddit's management was going through various messy leadership dramas.
Reddit gave Imgur an almost impossibly wide berth compared to other "made for Reddit" sites and allowed the owner to get away with all kinds of site policy violations. Imgur also set up various restrictions on content that were conveniently waived for Reddit images.
It turns out it was because Reddit took an investment stake in the service and didn't make it known for a long while.
Then Imgur decided to just become Reddit because, hey after all, they're responsible for some huge percentage of all traffic for the site -- this being entirely contrary to the communication the site put out about what they were and were going to be doing.
Now Reddit is just wholesale replacing it with an internal service -- which is what should have happened in the first place. It's been obvious for years that this should have been a core service, but the terrible previous management of the place had pretty much frozen all improvements to the site.
I think this move speaks more to the sane new management team doing the correct things than anything else. I'm really happy with the job that Steve Huffman et al are doing with the site, the decisions seem reasonable, well intentioned and generally in a good direction.
I was wondering about what you said about linking to a direct image being tricky.
As far as I can see, you can put the link to imgur (like http://imgur.com/gKt0Owa) or directly to the image (http://i.imgur.com/gKt0Owa.jpg) and both (as well as the html, bbcode and markdown versions) appear directly in the image page.
It's tricky because your direct image link redirects me to the full page with ads, and it's not obvious to you. Try hard refreshing your image link.
(I'm pretty sure the way it works is: it shows the image for certain referrers, and when you load the "full" page it requests the image with a referrer of imgur. That way you get the image, and then subsequent requests to the image are served from your browser cache so the direct links work)
Weird... I actually tried with a couple of different browsers (FF, Chrome and Safari) to check that it wasn't me logged in or something like that. Could it be ip-based, as I did all my tests with the same computer? Hmm...
Anyway, thanks for expanding on it; I've shared a few images through imgur and never had this issue (maybe it was before this change, or maybe the people receiving them never complained), so I was a bit puzzled by your comment.
I've been able to reproduce it with different browsers on the same computer. I'm not sure of the exact strategy, but it's just a big UX problem that I don't know what I'm sending another user.
... aaaaand now I want to make a malicious image host that always shows you your uploaded images but serves up goatse to anyone you link it to. Or maybe just flips the images, upsidedownternet style.
Imgur was the epitome of setting user expectations way too high. The service they offered was fantastic but costly, but users came to expect they should get it for free without clutter and monetisation wrapped around it.
It's a reinforcement of how important setting expectations with customers early is very important to avoid stepping on their toes later on.
The writing was always on the wall. They needed to start their own community because they were essentially a commodity product that could easily be replaced.
Completely expected as soon as they took money. They are exactly what organic "success" stories online look like. Now they want some of reddit's traffic and so reddit is fighting back at first by embedding images directly on the page and now hosting the image themselves. Reddit is also looking to maximize profit.
Yes. I also think that part of reddit's unspoken strategy with this is to get more people using their mobile apps instead of the high-quality third-party alternatives (which allows them to control the reddit experience more tightly, which they want to try to rehabilitate their image away from 4chanLite, and also allows them to get the ad views instead of giving them to third-party devs).
reddit is trying to squeeze back some of the juice from the third-party devs who use their API without being too overt about it, because they know the community would revolt. Twitter did the same thing much more loudly when they realized that they were giving away the farm by letting most of their userbase access the content via third-party apps.
This works because imgur and other image hosts are already well-integrated into third-party reddit apps, but reddit's image hosting isn't yet, and they can change things around/break it repeatedly until users get annoyed and just move to the official app to try to get a more seamless experience.
If this is their plan they aren't doing a very good job at executing it. Their mobile app is honestly outclassed by others. And their mobile web browsing experience is unpleasant to say the least. Each page takes a very long load time to load, despite it being a single page web app, and the load times cannot really be explained by what it is downloading, as other apps, and the desktop site, can load the same amount of data very quickly.
If the plan of trying to monetize mobile fails, I wonder who, or if, someone will just try to buy them out and try to do it better themselves. I am convenience that the reddit brand is very popular. The other day I started compiling something, and reflectively I alt tabbed and went to reddit, after realizing I was in the middle of doing something I closed it and got back to work, but I went their out of mussel memory - and I think that just goes to show how valuable their brand is.
No reference counting? This seems like it will cause problems:
[–]iBeReese 1246 points 3 hours ago
Is there a planned retention policy? Or is it an "as long as reddit has the money to maintain the servers the images will stay forever" kind of deal?
[–]Amg137[S,A] 1421 points 3 hours ago
We will keep the images as long as they are associated to a post. However if you delete a post we will also delete the image
[–]speedofdark8 1007 points 3 hours ago
How are reposts handled? If i upload something into /r/aww, get the link for that post's image, submit that link to /r/cats, then delete the /r/aww post, will the link in /r/cats still work?
[–]oldschoolred[A] 795 points 3 hours ago
No it wont... once the uploader removes the original post the link to that image will break
In the hypothetical case, the uploader is the person linking to it. They just want to post it on multiple subreddits without having to keep reuploading it.
Heck, I can see a similar situation where post 1 is on a subreddit with awkwardly enforced rules, post 2 is on a more relaxed one, and then because the mods remove the post and image on subreddit 1, the second version breaks with it.
Should people have to keep reuploading the same image every time they want to use it?
This is the announcement for the full rollout on the Web.
Access to the Reddit image host was formerly app-only. When the partial rollout occurred on test subreddits (including defaults like /r/pics), the number of submissions from the Reddit Image Host doubled. However, the market share of Imgur submissions remained unchanged, and in the weeks since then, the market share of both services has not changed at all: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f73AWzKsYrK7vFdJ3yJN...
It will be interesting to see how the full rollout affects Reddit globally, particular as Imgur's redirects are becoming non-user-friendly.
It's interesting that Reddit-hosted images have been averaging fewer upvotes than Imgur-hosted images, on /r/pics at least: http://i.imgur.com/91qkas5.png
One postulated reason is that browser plugin Reddit Enhancement Suite doesn't work as well with Reddit images as Imgur ones. But I wouldn't be surprised if something more subtle was also at work.
I know you're doing some work around this and it will be interesting to see wider results in a few months.
Yes, but that test only applies to official apps... Do we have usage data on those? Especially taking into account very good apps already existed and most users probably couldn't be arsed to switch to the official one.
Those official apps have lots of downloads, but don't be fooled: I bet most people downloaded them because of the free three months of reddit gold you got when you logged into them.
I don't think this is going to work for reddit long-term unless they change it so that removing the post tied to the image doesn't remove the image itself. People are going to share these images endlessly, perpetuating on Facebook posts and Instagrams for years and years. If they don't change their minds, we're going to see endless broken image links all over the internet as those reddit posts get deleted.
It's with my deepest regret that I have to tell you.. people already don't care for broken links. Every other link citation on Wikipedia is broken, if it's a link to a newspaper, the probability approaches 1 as these sites just don't bother in their perpetual quest for SEO and ad value.
It would be irresponsible for a machine learning black box like Google's indexer to give much importance to rel="nofollow". Think about it.
Imagine you're building the perfect internet indexer. In an effort to generalize your model, you anticipate a scenario where a nofollow link shows up consistently on various Wikipedia pages where it persists for a long time. What are you going to do? Ignore the link because, sorry, them's the rules?
Or are you going to realize that nofollow is about as useful of a signal as <meta name="keywords">?
The only reason you'd take someone's word for something is when you can't derive it yourself, like if the tech isn't there yet.
Google introduced nofollow in 2005 to either let people help fill a gaping hole in Google's tech at the time or for the smart marketing move of making people fixate on their magic attribute. Both under the guise that spammers would care.[1]
It's been twelve years.
The SEO advice industry and Matt Cutts' blog these days are probably like when I try to ponder why my cat scoots its waterdish around the room before it drinks: attempting to find backsplanations for the idiosyncrasies of a neural network that nobody quite understands.
Google certainly does take nofollow into account. Probably up to the point that spamming sites that add it to links is pointless.
That said, Google probably has some heuristic for considering them. It probably errs on the side of ignoring, but it would be stupid for Google to ignore all nofollow links. Even more so because spammers don't like them.
> It would be irresponsible for a machine learning black box like Google's indexer to give much importance to rel="nofollow".
My anecdata concludes exactly the same.
A link is a link. Sure Google acknowledges that a link is nofollow but it's not going to ignore references from a giant of the web like Wikipedia just because it adds nofollow.
With the exception of links to a limited list of other Wikis, one of which is Jimmy Wales' for-profit site Wikia. (At least, they used to be exempted from nofollow, it's possible that's changed at some point.)
FWIW, mod removals don't remove content. They just filter it from the listings. If you have a url, the content and everything will still be there (for self posts, comments can only be seen by the author but the data is still on the server.)
> If they don't change their minds, we're going to see endless broken image links all over the internet as those reddit posts get deleted.
You say that like that isn't exactly what has happened with all image hosts so far.
What history has taught us from these incidents, is that when old memes and similar posts go missing, the world wide web as a whole seems to cope just fine.
Besides whamlastxmas point, the danger that I see is also tied to copyright infringement.
Imgur and other small sites, mostly because they don't have much profit, don't suffer a lot from copyright takedowns. I think reddit won't have the same treatment, and Imgur will still be a viable long-term solution.
Thanks. The mobile site has a banner that takes up a lot of the screen advertising their app. I don't want their app, and I can't dismiss the advert. Still, it's saved me wasting time browsing.
It's a website, I already have an app for that, it's my web browser. No desire to spend my limited phone storage space on something I can just use my web browser for.
Tabs. Loading on mobile still takes a second or two. Tabs help with this. All those native apps usually staring at blank screen half the time. And I have 4g and top of the line phone.
Originally it seemed like Imgur was a benevolent gift to Reddit users... a clean, simple, easy to use image hosting service that everyone could use for free. I guess it was too good to be true, because now it's tricky to link to a direct image (though not impossible), and the standard landing page is filled with unnecessary clutter.
As an aside: if you're looking for an amusing read, the "IgnorantImgur" subreddit[0] is filled with examples of people from the Imgur community who seem to be oblivious to Imgur's origin as an image hosting site for Reddit users.
[0]: http://www.reddit.com/r/IgnorantImgur/top