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Imgur Acquired by Medialab

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Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#161

Post by adventured »

bserge wrote: post #126
icelancer wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads are worth a magnitude less today than they were in 2009.

What? They're crazy competitive these days. Every popular ad space online has been bought by the highest bidder. AdWords, Facebook, Imgur, Reddit, companies are dumping cash like mad. The market grew by billions over the past decade.

The ad market basically bifurcated. It's a land of the haves and have nots

The big ad platforms like Facebook and Google have thrived, of course. And as platforms like Snapchat have aged they've gradually improved the rates they're getting for their ad space (a typical process).

The scale of online advertising today isn't because the industry's median or average CPMs went up 100 fold. The volume went up dramatically over the last 10-15 years with the traffic for the big services. The big advertisers brought billion dollar ad budgets online and handed them to Facebook, not to one-click image hosts.

Your typical one-click image host is not going to command better ad rates today vs 15 years ago. It's a worse context than it was back then, actually. Back then advertisers were relatively stupid when it came to online advertising, today they're a lot more sophisticated, and a lot more strict about where they place ads (eg porn on one-click image hosts is a big problem for advertisers). The big, rich platforms like Facebook eat a large share of the high paying advertising. What's left for something like a one-click image host, is very, very low paying ads that you have to run a trillion of to make money.

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#162

Post by airstrike »

stavros wrote: post #122
silisili wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It's delightfully funny without going overboard, or being too cheesy like most bigger companies who try to be cheeky. I'm signing up.

The trick is to actually not care about whether people buy your stuff! Hard to pull off when you're trying to make money, but easy for me.

While that may be true, you actually seem to have genuine talent for comedy. I'm inclined to pay for IMGZ for that reason alone, even though I may never really use it.

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#163

Post by LilBytes »

emptysongglass wrote: post #98
stavros wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is one of the greatest pieces of website comedy I have ever seen.

> Let's talk money. As you may have noticed from the subtle but effective messaging, this service isn't free. That's because we want to avoid having to sell photos of your vagina to shady Russian oligarchs to pay for our servers and cocaine.

You weren't kidding. Amazing.

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#164

Post by andrekandre »

munk-a wrote: post #89
BurningFrog wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Selling" and "selling out" are not (always) the same thing.

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 des…

  > 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).
one option i don't see discussed a lot is selling to your employees (converting to a coop, full esop etc)

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#165

Post by bubblethink »

Lammy wrote: post #138
Jerry2 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Had to look a bit harder to even find their website ( https://www.medialab.la/ ) - 'a holding company of consumer internet brands' heh, sheesh, yeah that's not sketchy. I find it curious that there's no page about who owns/runs MediaLab. Not even a single blurb about their executives/management!

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 :)

So are they Chinese or Japanese?

Edit: To anyone who doesn't get the joke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_CaZ4EAexQ

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#166

Post by seph-reed »

missedthecue wrote: post #94
munchler wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Anything bought by Microsoft in the past 10 years. Minecraft, Github, LinkedIn, all are better products today than they were at the time of sale.

> Minecraft

Take it back!

Seriously though, I remember MC before it was a kids game. It was already becoming one by the time Microsoft bought it, but since then almost every update has been gimmicks for kids. The world generation is still ridiculous (jungles next to arctics), the weather patterns are binary (hard rain, or nothing), and proximity chat is practically impossible.

They've made a lot of money off making it into a kids game, but I personally haven't been delighted by any updates since they took it over.

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#167

Post by seph-reed »

Damn. Imgur just became amazing in the last month.

They rolled out a feature where you can filter out political posts, and it's become the only place I can go to just enjoy some mindless scrolling.

There's still a ton of political posters who never tag, but you can mute them. And then there's the "look how dumb those people are" circle jerks, that aren't actually political. But all in all, I have a pretty decent quality to circle jerk ratio.

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#168

Post by teraflop »

techrat wrote: post #31
slig wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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.

It's not just a poor design. old.reddit.com currently has what ought to be considered a show-stopping functional bug: every gallery post (that is, every post with multiple images) has its URL replaced with the empty string, causing it to render as a purple link that goes nowhere. If you instead click the little "comments" link, the post loads as normal.

This has been reported to the admins dozens of times since it first started happening about 3 months ago, and so far the only response is "we're looking into it". I'm not sure which possibility is more damning: the idea that they're incapable of fixing such an obvious regression, or that they literally don't care because they're trying to irritate everybody enough to switch to the newer, uglier version of the site.

https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/o6ckmr/threads_showin...

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#169

Post by InitialLastName »

missedthecue wrote: post #94
munchler wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Anything bought by Microsoft in the past 10 years. Minecraft, Github, LinkedIn, all are better products today than they were at the time of sale.

You only just got under the wire with that 10-year cutoff; MS purchased Skype in May 2011.

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#170

Post by stavros »

airstrike wrote: post #162
stavros wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is to actually not care about whether people buy your stuff! Hard to pull off when you're trying to make money, but easy for me.

While that may be true, you actually seem to have genuine talent for comedy. I'm inclined to pay for IMGZ for that reason alone, even though I may never really use it.

My favorite kind of user <3
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