Way back when Imgur was first announced, not having ANY ads was a proud selling point for the website, then competing against the much more obnoxious Photobucket/ImageShack.
Can I advertise on imgur?
Hell no! This is a free site (as in beer) and there will never be any ads on it unless I end up selling out for a million dollars.
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)?
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
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.
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.
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.
That link is great to have up front too, but TechCrunch does have an actual article here, not merely blog spam. This includes a talk with Imgur’s COO Roy Seghal.
TC won't even load in my HN reader app. Annoying that all of these lightning posters stick with the link from their RSS feed rather than taking the time to find the original source. Always results in mods having to replace.
This seems like a lost opportunity for a full fledged YouTube competitor.
I know video isn't trivial, but if you're going for it, might as well go big. There are lots of YouTube creators that have been demonetized and are resented at them. It seems like a great opportunity to start capturing little pieces of that huge pie. Almost every YT creator that I follow has been hit with a few copyright strikes, most of them are not even fighting back anymore. Why not offer those «selected» videos a new home? For them, even if on Imgur they earn $1 dollar, it's $1 dollar they are not seeing from YouTube.
With some luck they can start to get some niche YouTubers, and after that, a few years later you have a full YT competitor.
Sadly, what we get is 30 second max limit, maybe good enough to be another Vine.
YouTube doesn't just demonetize for the fun of it. They do it because advertisers are threatening to pull their ads off the service entirely if there's a risk of being placed against offensive content.
What makes you think any youtube competitor would have better luck convincing advertisers to run ads against the same content youtube has demonetized?
Of course it is. And the best ways to monetize videos beyond ad-tech is product placements, in-video sponsorships, and Patreon. Which demonetized YouTube creators still have access to, which gives them very little reason to switch to a different platform.
The best way for a platform to monetize videos is ad-tech. And nobody is better at ad-tech than google.
YouTube has that too. YT has a paid premium service, purchasable creator sponsorships, superchat, a tickets/merchandise shelf, and an influencer marketing platform (through YT-owned Famebit). These form alternative revenue streams for many creators and are available even if the content isn't running ads.
> They do it because advertisers are threatening to pull their ads off the service entirely if there's a risk of being placed against offensive content.
But who decides what is offensive? Are videos about gun safety "offensive"? Until recently the answer for that would have been "no", but not so any more.
The terms for what is considered "acceptable" is getting smaller and smaller all the time, people get less exposure to things which challenges their views, making them even more likely to be "offended" by even more harmless stuff, even facts.
If you look for right-wing channels, anti-religious channels (which includes criticism of Islam!) or worse, anti-feminist channels (you know, people who would rather have equality over specially honed women's-rights) which has been demonetized by YouTube, you will find they have been hit across the board.
If you however look for left-wing, pro-immigrant or feminist channels... I challenge you to find a single one which has been banned or demonetized for being "offensive". These views are for some reason not affected by this increasingly narrow definition of what is "acceptable", despite many of them being openly sexist and racist.
With certain platforms completely dominating the market (like Facebook & YouTube), having non-leftists either banned or treated as second-class citizens can be considered quite undemocratic.
People who previously could engage in a reasonable debate in a diverse environment (as in diversity of thought, not some token superficial "diversity" in forms of race or sex) are now being excluded, pushed out, into what certainly will be non-diverse echo-chambers.
What the long-term effects of such actions are can be hard to predict, but I doubt they will be good.
Explicitly catering to illegal content (or legally disputed content) is one of the worst things any established company could do.
Catering to legal but "demonetized" content won't land you in jail at least, but probably still isn't a great business decision. YouTube already allows advertisers to advertise on most risky inventory (aka "demonetized" videos), they just rarely do so. It's unlikely that advertisers will want to pay more for the same category of video just because it's on a different platform. A startup that chooses to adopt this approach is going to have a hard time attracting creators since they'll have an equal or (most likely) worse monetization narrative than YouTube for that class of content.
IMO a business that wants to enter the online video market would be best served by focusing on product differentiation. This is probably why imgur is trying to do some interesting experimentation with gif-like restrictions.
> Explicitly catering to illegal content (or legally disputed content)
You mean like all the demonetized gun safety videos?
Your biggest mistake here is assuming that Google only demonetized things which are offensive, questionable or illegal. Most demonetized channels carry no such things.
Their biggest problem is usually that they are not "on board" with the ideologies currently pushed by the radical political left.
Google demonetized videos that their sponsors wanted demonetized. Now, I don't know, but I find it rather far fetched that Google's large sponsors are exclusively part of the 'radical political left', but even if they are - they're the ones spending the money. Imgur could try and court those video makers to produce for example gun safety videos on imgur, but to make a profit they have to also attract advertisers. Pushing a set of content that the advertising have already found unattractive seems like a bad way of bringing those advertisers across.
I understand that’s the intention, but is that actually the end result?
I feel like the de-monetization went way overboard, most likely because it’s either monkeys or a shitty algorithm like the one for identifying copyright infringement on audio or prioritising clickbait in “recommended” videos.
As a result I do believe there is a possibility for a site to offer a better space both for creators and advertisers, where the monetization criteria is defined by humans (possibly even the video’s creator, under threat of deleting their channel if they intentionally mislabel it - instead of monkeys or stupid algorithms).
You highly underestimate what it would take to run Youtube competition. The technical infrastructure and the amount of money that needs to be thrown at it is truly out of reach for 99.9% of the company out there. There are literally a handful of companies who have the technical chops and the money to start a Youtube competitor.
After more than a decade of investment, youtube only recently started becoming profitable. So even if a company has the money and the technical chops to start a youtube competition, they really need to think twice before going through this much trouble.
Is there a source for YouTube being profitable? I’ve only ever seen people say maybe it’s profitable and also assumptions or hand waving of how YouTube saves a lot of money by being able to use Google’s infrastructure. I assumed to this day YouTube isn’t actually profitable.
I initially thought that you were making a comment in jest, but then I realised that pornhub actually already have one of the world's largest and most reliable video streaming platforms.
They have the infrastructure and technical know how, but PornHub is able to make money because advertising for porn is a completely different beast from advertising on a general purpose video hosting site. You can use all sorts of invasive advertising and dark patterns on a porn site that nobody would put up with elsewhere.
I'm pretty sure Facebook could do it technically. They just haven't figured out how to fill a feed with autoplay videos (presumably required to get convincing view counts) without making it utter trash.
Maybe Netflix is well placed because they already have the ISP relationships and CDN set up, if they can figure a way to leverage that for user uploaded content? I doubt they're interested though.
Most likely, but Amazon's reputation with customer service they will do a piss poor job at it. I don't see Amazon doing it. To be fair I don't see any reasonably sane company going after Youtube, there is no market, there is no momentum. There are isolated niche scenarios and it's not worth the money or time for large companies.
YouTube doesn't make any money. Google literally subsidizes the whole platform for over a decade already. No one can compete with that. Maybe some crypto-based video platform where people give away some of their CPU/GPU cycles while watching videos might do it, but the blockchain complexity might be already beyond making that profitable either for the rate of new video appearances YouTube deals with. Not mentioning costs of running them through some filter to catch ugly and universally illegal things before they go live.
I assumed [s]he meant to say YouTube doesn’t make a profit. Or at least doesn’t seem to make a profit as a stand-alone entity. Not completely sure if that’s true but it seems like it still is or is unknown.
I actually googled that recently (in response to this announcement) and they seem to be break-even or possibly profitable. But yes, they were unprofitable for a long time.
They don't disclose their separate financials so no-one not related to Alphabet knows for sure.
Feels like just yesterday that "doing video" was the most efficient way to burn giant piles of money.
What changed? Compression got better, but it doesn't feel like bandwidth got cheaper. Is it all just because it's easier to spin up a video hosting infrastructure on some cloud stack?
A general understanding on how to scale massive video platform is well understood now more than ever, but it still remains a very efficient way to burn cash. To give you an example:
I own an ISP and about 2 years ago, we got first GGC node (basically youtube CDN), they are provided free by Google to ISPs as long as you are willing to host it at your own expense and you meet a certain bandwidth requirement, I think it was 1gbps youtube traffic at that time. Anyways they send us free 3 fully stacked Dell R720, shipped it us from another country. To the best of my knowledge, each of them cost 5kUSD. Total throughout after saturating ~30 Gbps, we will be given 3 more of these. In our country, to the best of my knowledge, there are 40 ISPs who have these nodes. A least 5 of them have 2 full racks worth of these servers - all free paid for by Youtube/Google.
This is just one country. Investment still remains an insane task for video hosting.
Bandwidth in terms of IP transit purchased at major IX points is a lot cheaper now. Also it is possible to offload a lot of traffic by settlement free peering if you have the money and scale to build a network with POPs in about 8 to 12 major carrier ix points in the USA. If you are a huge content source downstream singlehomed eyeball ISPs are happy to peer with you.
What caused this change? Carrier-hotel POP infrastructure [both technical and legal/regulatory] set up to serve Netflix and Cloudflare having positive externalities?
One of many reasons: Huge, fat pipes inter city are a lot cheaper now. What you used to pay for one 10GbE transport circuit on somebody's dwdm system will now buy 100GbE.
Another reason, stuff is clustered close together now. Exampels being the datacenters in Hillsboro OR and Ashburn VA.
Search and social command decent amounts as well but those are effectively controlled by 4 companies. For the wide internet, yes video ads are where the money is at.
A webm is actually smaller than the original gif, usually small enough to also pack in an mp3 track and still end up smaller than the original. Compression getting better is a huge part of this.
Imgur has been using video files instead of GIFs for years already, they call it GIFV. Anything over 2MB is autoconverted to (IIRC) h264 encoded mp4 files. They just added the ability to include sound.
Bandwidth isn't so much the problem, but transcoding. It's extremely CPU intensive and until very recently you either had to roll your own infrastructure from metal up, or pay insane EC2 prices to transcode uploaded videos. Now AWS has Elastic Transcoder, and there are a multitude of smaller SaaS popping up providing the same.
Doing video is cheap. Doing video well and without scaling issues (especially) live is still quite expensive. Not as bad as it used to be but still, it can eat up quite a bit of money. You'd need some way to monetize it if you are not going to limit clip length. Alternatively, at an even larger scale the equation turns around and suddenly you can set up your own fiber network and get some support from ISPs because you reduce their transit costs if they get your fiber into their 'meet-me' rooms.
Doing video on a third party cloud environment would be prohibitively expensive.
It’s certainly easier than it was before, but video is also as hard as ever because of the many moving parts. To replicate YouTube (in terms of basic features, not scale), you need:
- robust transcoding that is reasonably fast, into a multitude of different formats to accommodate web and mobile (example problem: do you support vertical videos)
- a good CDN at the best cost you can. videos need to start almost immediately
- ability to snap thumbnails and other artifacts
- lots of storage
- a fast single page app
- content controls (because a lot of people upload porn)
- a good extensible player that supports fullscreen and VAST ads and whatever else
- a robust uploader that can reliably handle large chunked uploads
I remember a quote from Chad Hurley where he said the reason YouTube succeeded was because unlike its competitors, who were all offering similar services, it didn’t suck. Given this laundry list of must-haves, you can see why it was so easy to suck.
They serve tons of "gifs" as video files already, anything labeled as a gifv is really an html5 video element with MP4 or WebM. It looks just as good and loads much faster.
You could put ads on that just as easily, but it'd be a huge dick move if the ads had sound.
Right, and the draw of GIFs is that they have no sound.
I’m pretty sure this move might kill Imgur, not that they had a business to begin with. Reddit already switched to an in house S3 bucket and CDN for UGC uploads a while ago, content will either age out with attrition or be backfilled by users.
Imgur is going to be quite the ArchiveTeam project.
Maybe I'm unlucky but in my experience the reddit video player is terrible and maybe 25% of the of the time just gives me a black box or the first frame and won't play.
It also has the caveat that if you want to share it with someone you have to send them a link to the reddit comment thread, which is not always desired or appropriate.
BTW I've had the same problem, the solution is to just click it twice (once to "pause" it and once to unpause it). For what it's worth I've only gotten this problem since chrome released their update that disables autoplay (https://blog.chromium.org/2018/03/chrome-66-beta-css-typed-o...).
I think the black box just means that the first frame is black
Most of the times I've had it are on iOS, and no amount of tapping or putting it in full screen mode where you can use the native video controls will make it load.
I wonder if they're trying to serve WebM or some other unsupported codec to iOS devices by accident, but I'd think that would have some kind of error indication instead of a black box.
I absolutely hate that you can't link directly to the media on reddit's hosting service. If I share something with a friend, I usually am not doing it so they can read a forum of internet comments first. This is something that imgur hasn't done and will continue to be an important differentiator for me.
They're probably paying for some low-tier bandwidth. That's something that can always be changed.
But the real upside is that your uploads will live along with your reddit post. Amazing how reddit becomes a dead-link factory when you go back just one year.
I don't know what low-tier BW means (I own an ISP), I think they problem reddit video is that their video infrastructure is most likely not geographically distributed and also not have peering with major telcos, which gives you high latency and poor playback for people who lives far from reddit video servers. Maybe they will eventually fix it, not sure if they have that much money to burn on repeated memes and porn videos.
Then something is wrong with their setup. It's just not me. I have seen many comments on Reddit on how horrible their video platform is, it takes forever to load.
what's the difficulty in splicing in some additional frames at upload or request-time? From what I vaguely recall of the format it's essentially a stream of stream of independent frames with some timing info, although there might be something about colour palette selection? I'm sure there could be something that makes it especially horrible, but curious what it is :-)
Isn't video advertising mostly handled at a higher layer by sticking some segments into the playlist/container rather than actually encoding it into a single video unit anyway?
GIF is only 256 colours, so the renderer optimises the living daylights out of the palette to make things look vaguely uncrappy. Any ad inserted would have to only use those colours (which are then very different from GIF to GIF). That's a tough sell for brand graphic designers. GIFs are also often short loops, breaking the loop with an ad, especially when inserted automatically, will break a high number, if not most, of the good GIFs in circulation. Doing anything dynamically also breaks caching which is probably undesirable when most of your business is pumping dumb bytes around the net.
Finally, you can't add a link. I guess it's still useful for brand advertising, but I suspect that's less valuable than the kind where you can directly track conversions.
You can use 256 colors per-frame, as well as using transparancy. Also, each frame is just a diff from the previous frame's content. So it's not unreasonable, just pointless when video formats are so good.
>what's the difficulty in splicing in some additional frames at upload or request-time?
Are you aware of the CPU overhead and lag time involved with just "splicing in some additional frames" to a video file within the context of an HTTP request cycle?
obviously it's not going to be free, I was more curious what made it specifically 'more difficult than video'.
I'd hope there would be some opportunity for caching to make it a bit cheaper than every single request, but maybe with dynamic targeted or real-time ad bidding that wouldn't work so well.
The hilarious part about that is that when medium launched everybody was falling over themselves to say how this was the future of blogging because of the pretty fonts and the lack of annoying screen real estate consuming extras.
I would understand if the popup appeared once, after 5 articles. But the fact that it's every article I read is just infuriating. I have literally no reason to sign up to Medium.
I've been too lazy to block the popup, but I think I will next time it appears.
Don't forget about when it asks you to share the highlighted text! I've disabled that with some Chrome extension, thankfully, but haven't figured out the popup yet.
God, I hate that highlighted text, because it's always some faux-deep quote that just pisses me off. Like I might have appreciated it if it weren't for that stupid highlighting making it look like it's a teenager stopping halfway through a presentation to look at you and make sure that you caught he said something intelligent.
I get irrationally angry at that highlighting. BTW ublock origin might be able to block the popup, if you right click -> block element
As someone who's had to implement one of those nagging popups(and argue with marketing 'growth hackers' about it) I can tell they are unfortunately effective, and it's more likely to see more of them in future.
Everyone is annoyed, but many of those who are annoyed will just follow the instructions and increase the metric of whoever wanted those .
That definitely hurts my experience as well. I even tried having the app installed for a bit, but that shoved stuff on the screen I didn't want as well. I guess they are under business pressure to show you more than the content in order to make money...
Short, shareable videos from a known content-creation minded community reminds me a lot of Vine. I wonder if Imgur is trying to re-energize that community?
i was just thinking the exact same thing, I'm glad that I'm not the only one. i really loved vine greatly, and I had been thinking about making a service to replace it, since I really liked the format. Though I think having a 30 second time limit like the imgur video would sort of lose something in the transition, as vines sort of have their impact and memorable nature from their shortness. however there are also often times where I wish a vine did have more time to develop and formulate a cohesive story so I could see longer times as perhaps useful in certain situations.
I don’t see how Imgur can be profitable to begin with.
Nobody will pay for it, and people are ignoring ads more and more (not to mention that too much intrusive ads, like video ads will drive some people away completely).
I like imgur's service. I want to use it for the things I do and would like them to keep being a quick image host. If that means paying annually so I can keep my API key working the way it does and not having my experience ruined by increasingly intrusive advertising I absolutely would throw money their way.
There isn't "nobody" out there not willing to invest in their entertainment. I'm sure we're a minority but we're not "nobody".
Maybe if all these little sites could band together into a single subscription bundle it would be worth it, but I don't want 20 different subscriptions.
Why isn't any of these sites trying to provide premium services in a subscription model? You have a quarter of a billion users. Find something that 1% of them would pay for, charge $50 annually and you have enough money to keep going for ages. Why does it always has to be advertising?
It's about time. I never understood the fascination with GIFs. Invariably, FMV GIFs would either be accompanied by, or have requested, a YouTube source video that actually had the audio.
