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Imgur Acquired by Medialab

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Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#51

Post by smnrchrds »

intricatedetail wrote: post #30
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #26

Imgur, great service, lasted this long, amazing. But I always wondered how any of these random image hosts afforded bandwidth (reminds of the other various ones like TwitPic who was saved from being taken offline by Twitter). I mean, I have a gallery of images in there, privately stored, directly linked to here and there around the net, without paying for anything for years. I think at one point I can't even remember…

Bandwidth is pretty cheap if you look beyond cloud. There are providers that offer magnitudes cheaper bandwidth than e.g. AWS but you have to set servers yourself.

At their scale, nothing is cheap. Some things are cheaper than others, but even the cheapest option must be costing a fortune each month.

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#53

Post by filmgirlcw »

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 at various stages of distress/hype (and incubated some that are very successful in their own right, like Match Group) and managed to get goodish CPMs across the sites they bundle together), most of the time it doesn’t. But the goal is to acquire the brand/traffic, cut costs to the bone, and attempt to profit off the traffic by selling ads or user data or whatever. It’s a rollup play and the goal is definitely not to invest back into the companies themselves any more than they need to run.

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#54

Post by ChrisArchitect »

smnrchrds wrote: post #51
intricatedetail wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bandwidth is pretty cheap if you look beyond cloud. There are providers that offer magnitudes cheaper bandwidth than e.g. AWS but you have to set servers yourself.

At their scale, nothing is cheap. Some things are cheaper than others, but even the cheapest option must be costing a fortune each month.

Right, it's the scale and seemingly limitless ceiling.... seems crazy. Obviously there's a lot of low res tiny images on there etc but there's also not -- and for years and years?

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#55

Post by jdorfman »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #29

Medialab's other things include like, Genius (ok, fair enough, sustains itself / useful/ well-used I'm assuming)....and Kik? The teen messaging app from like 2010 that no one uses anymore? hm 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.

> Kik? The teen messaging app from like 2010 that no one uses anymore?

I use to think the same thing, until I listened to this episode of Darknet Diaries:

https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#56

Post by bozhark »

sbierwagen wrote: post #19
pram wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite part is that they added 'social' stuff to imgur uploads, so your images (probably) have a separate set of terrible comments you're not even aware of.

Imgur comments have the old twitter length limit, 140 characters.

watch they weren't even hosting the files, it just backpages to twitter posts

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#58

Post by Belphemur »

jamescun wrote: post #8

Interesting, I hadn't heard of MediaLab until just a few days ago when I listened to a Darknet Diaries episode[1] about Kik and some "content problems" that MediaLab are leaving unresolved. [1] https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/

I thought exactly the same.

It doesn't bode well for Imgur future. They don't care about their acquisition. It's to wonder why are they doing it in the first place.

The company doesn't have any public information either. All I can find is a LONG list of job openings: https://jobs.lever.co/medialab

Weird list if they are just "investors".

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#59

Post by NelsonMinar »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #29

Medialab's other things include like, Genius (ok, fair enough, sustains itself / useful/ well-used I'm assuming)....and Kik? The teen messaging app from like 2010 that no one uses anymore? hm 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.

Kik's the website that had a serious child porn and child sexual solicitation problem. I think they've tried to do something about that in the last couple of years but from a quick Google search it's not clear it's really worked.

Re: Imgur Acquired by Medialab

#60

Post by mcny »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #54
smnrchrds wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At their scale, nothing is cheap. Some things are cheaper than others, but even the cheapest option must be costing a fortune each month.

Right, it's the scale and seemingly limitless ceiling.... seems crazy. Obviously there's a lot of low res tiny images on there etc but there's also not -- and for years and years?

I remember back around 2009(?) ish I had a chance to talk to some folks at Justin.tv (now twitch) and they said one ad on the stream every few hours more than covers all the costs. What changed?

I guess the videos are much more high resolution now than the webcam size 320x240 videos back then but has cost gone up that much?

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