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Image Hosting on Reddit

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Re: Image Hosting on Reddit

#131

Post by SeanDav »

radu_floricica wrote: post #123
shalmanese wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 magnitud…

> I'm surprised Google never just bought imgur 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.

Some huge name corporations are very involved in the porn industry. Clearly, that fact is not well known.

Re: Image Hosting on Reddit

#132

Post by StevePerkins »

radu_floricica wrote: post #123
shalmanese wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 magnitud…

> I'm surprised Google never just bought imgur 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.

I take it you're not familiar with Bing's #1 use case and specialty.

Re: Image Hosting on Reddit

#133

Post by mtbcoder »

smt88 wrote: post #127
radu_floricica wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm surprised Google never just bought imgur 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?

Re: Image Hosting on Reddit

#134

Post by JorgeGT »

chadscira wrote: post #66
dmerrick wrote: post #10

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 yo…

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! :)

---

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...

Re: Image Hosting on Reddit

#135

Post by pyvpx »

nopzor wrote: post #118
pyvpx wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

imgur worked because a CDN named voxel could readily use the bandwidth bump provided by hosting images to decrease their overall network costs.

Voxel founder here. That doesn't really make sense, as others have pointed out. Imgur was indeed a valued customer, and we grew together and had a great relationship with them. Customers like them helped us achieve the necessary scale to build out our network. But pushing more bits costs more, not less ;)

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.

Re: Image Hosting on Reddit

#136

Post by pyvpx »

gohrt wrote: post #70
pyvpx wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

imgur worked because a CDN named voxel could readily use the bandwidth bump provided by hosting images to decrease their overall network costs.

how does that work?

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?

Re: Image Hosting on Reddit

#137

Post by josteink »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #18

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.

> 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.

Re: Image Hosting on Reddit

#138

Post by bane »

dmerrick wrote: post #10

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 yo…

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.

Re: Image Hosting on Reddit

#139

Post by simonswords82 »

StevePerkins wrote: post #132
radu_floricica wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm surprised Google never just bought imgur 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.

I take it you're not familiar with Bing's #1 use case and specialty.

I'm not. Do tell!

Re: Image Hosting on Reddit

#140

Post by simonswords82 »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #31
shalmanese wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 magnitud…

What makes you think imgur is dead? They have a thriving community independent of Reddit. Some might even argue it's a better community.

Some might argue that, but it doesn't make imgur's business model any more sustainable unfortunately.
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