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Imgur Acquired by Medialab

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Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#181

Post by MisterBastahrd »

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.

I used to work for a company in a niche industry that used to clear 7 figures a year using the online platform I put together back in its heyday. And while traffic isn't quite as good as it used to be, it's still at about 70%. Their ad revenue is today about 1/8th of what they were making back in 2011-2015ish, and they basically have zero dedicated staff to the platform. I just do some maintenance and bug fixes for them every month.

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#182

Post by epa »

degenerate wrote: post #17
dpedu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correct. ImageShack was the most widely used host on reddit and had recently disabled hotlinking (after nearly a year of ad bloat on their main site) so user MrGrim on reddit created Imgur and announced it on Reddit 12 years ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t... He did an AMA 3 years later: https://old.reddit.com//r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgu...

It was one specific date which imageshack decided to essentially ban all images being linked on Reddit. Imgur filled the void and grew via their own social.

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#183

Post by paxys »

Aeolun wrote: post #177
MauranKilom wrote: post #96

Hm. My bet would be that you can now count the number of years until imgur links go dead on one hand. This prompted me to check whether there were any backup efforts already, and how much data that would involve. Indeed, archiveteam has some good info: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur > Imgur serves a massive amount of traffic. In 2012 alone, 42 petabytes of data were transferred. Fortunately, the amount…

Huh, all of Imgur costs only +/- $2000/month to store on Backblaze. That’s not that bad.

Storage is cheap. Bandwidth is usually the killer.

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#184

Post by Havoc »

EasyTiger_ wrote: post #4

Wasn't this the company that ostensibly began on reddit? Their founder used to post many promises about "not selling out" and the rest.

Yes. Though it did seem genuinely well meaning at the time. Reddit was pretty shit pre imgur pictures wise.

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#185

Post by benzible »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #53
darkwizard42 wrote: post #5

Medialab has now acquired Kik (2019), Imgur (2021), Genius (2021)... Big spree of acquisitions! Anyone have any idea the goal?

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…

Most of this is dead on but I've been in the middle of this type of deal and "happy to sell" wouldn't be an accurate description of the investors. Having some % of failures is built into the VC model but they'd still much rather have gotten their capital back.

Also, this reminds me of Computer Associates' (later CA Technologies) business model: buy enterprise software companies with locked-in customers, fire staff and cut costs as far as possible, and increase maintenance fees, all with the understanding the the business will deteriorate over time. I think here the equivalent of "increase maintenance fees" may be "load up the product with even more ads".

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#186

Post by paxys »

EasyTiger_ wrote: post #4

Wasn't this the company that ostensibly began on reddit? Their founder used to post many promises about "not selling out" and the rest.

Imgur should have sold to Reddit a long time ago. Not being able to work out a deal was lose-lose for both companies.

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#187

Post by ajsnigrutin »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #147
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #73

I can't share the love for Imgur: for some reason, all imgur posts, including this one, are never displayed on my mobile Firefox. Just blank screen, and that's it. (the only addon I have is uBlock origin, and I'm too lazy to try turning it off for some random images)

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.

Holy fuck that's anoying..

http://example.com/foobar.png <- if an url looks like that, I expect a direct link to the image... not some freaky redirect to a shitty webpage with floating popups, cookie prompts and "download the app"... why do I need an app to view a fucking image?! I already have one, it's called a browser!

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#188

Post by cobertos »

robertoandred wrote: post #106
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 communi…

Yeah but who goes to the front page of imgur?

I used to in college. Extremely bad habit, was easy to spend 4+ hours there just hitting the right arrow.

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#189

Post by teraflop »

Abrownn wrote: post #180
teraflop wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

That 'empty string/purple link' issue still happens to me even on NewReddit. I can find old Galleries that work just fine on both, it's so weird.

Interesting, I hadn't seen it reported on the new version before. I spend more time than I ought to browsing Reddit, and I literally haven't seen a single correctly-working gallery post on any subreddit in months.

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#190

Post by lxm »

tyrfing wrote: post #178

Interesting company. It was created in 2018 [1], and the CEO is Michael Heyward, who was a co-founder of Whisper. Some interesting shuffling happened with Whisper [2] and it's now owned by MediaLab. Since then they have acquired a number of other properties, the general idea seems to buy declining brands for cheap and extract as much value as possible on mobile. [3] There is no public information on their funding. 1.…

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