I'd add that one of the reasons they became so popular is largely due to a very tolerant reddit admin team.
Try to make a similar service today and get growth on reddit the same way and you'll likely get added to the global spam block list.
Reddit has also invested an undisclosed amount, which Mr. Schaaf said was “very small in comparison.” Regardless of size, the investment from Reddit represents a formal business connection between two entities that have so far shared only a legacy and community.
Imgur was originally created as a gift to the Reddit community for easy image sharing, and now has grown to be larger than Reddit itself, pulling in over three billion monthly pageviews. What began as a platform for uploading images, Imgur has become a vibrant and shrewd community of commenters, uploaders and up-voters.
If you look at MrGrim's early post history, it's a blatant violation of reddit's anti-spam rule. However, it was (and is) insanely useful and entirely disrupted the image hosting "industry". Even today, the vast majority of MrGrim's posts are imgur posts, which is an explicit violation of the "rules".
It's not a knock against imgur or reddit (I love both), just an interesting observation.
You can violate the rules if you're not obviously a bad actor. In this case, imgur and MrGrim was clearly spam, but it wasn't the bad kind of spam that everybody hates, it was the good kind of marketing where people actually get something useful from the exchange.
edit #2
IIR imgur also had an explicit no porn policy for a very long while, except for NSFW reddits.
I have tried to build a similar service (https://mediacru.sh), and made a lot of choices that would supposedly increase goodwill:
- No ads
- Open source
- Extremely transparent
The opinion of Reddit's userbase was almost universally positive.
However, the Reddit admins did not like that at all. They banned the domain for weeks right after launch, and only unbanned it after quite a lot of begging. They also shadowbanned my personal account for a while, and that wasn't too easy to get lifted, either.
They're very hostile to anything but Imgur these days. Hell, I worry about writing this here, because if they see it, we might get into another round of bullshit with them.
This is what I dislike about reddit. They let MrGrim in and now imgur is almost as bad as the conventional image hosts. Everytime I visit imgur, the interface has gotten more complex and now its trying to be a social photo sharing site of its own, instead of a just a simple host.
So lets say I went out and created a competing service, which is something I've considered. Now the reddit admins will ban me for violating the rules while MrGrim gets a free pass because of community politics.
Its incredible to me that reddit sells itself as being above the fray and an alternative to sites that had more patronage, when its a lot of ' meet the old boss, same as the old boss.' I suspect popular sites have a typical lifecycle. Launch, buzz, a golden period, then a decay once monetization becomes a concern, then another group of hungry 20 somethings eats its lunch.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. VCs want one thing - money (note - that's not a bad thing). If for some reason that this motivation (and more importantly the implementation of this motivation) pisses off Reddit users, then Reddit will ostracize the hell out of Imgur, it will lose a large chunk of traffic and something will replace it overnight.
As Gabe Newell once said "You can't lie on Reddit".
I build image hosting service which was 'great' for it's time (2006) called Image Socket (http://www.imagesocket.com).
It became extremely successful in just a few days due to support from another (popular at the time) web site called SomethingAwful.
Alternatives at the time sucked. Unfortunately I failed to pivot it into something that does not rely exclusively on one or two popular web sites as it's source of traffic.
Congrats to Imgur for jumping on Reddit early and a becoming somewhat independent at this point.
It's funny that I had an opportunity to compete with them because my site was already build and widely utilized when Reddit came out but I never imaged that Reddit would blow up so fast and by the time it did, competing with Imgur was impossible.
Seeing the comments below., the similar questions could be raised for a even bigger bandwidth beast. Youtube. And imgur is essentially the Youtube of images.
And speaking of profits, 140 Characters is barely generating any revenue despite it would be the only service of its size consuming the least (hosting) resources.
So I guess investors do not see the value in profits rather in popularity when it comes to crazy start-ups. Considering Instagram which got acquired for the ‘notorious’ 1 Billion. If we use the same mathematical formula, I guess imgur is worth at least 2x of Instagram.
Which really make one question the valuations that are out there. If reddit isn't at least a billion dollar company by this measure I don't know what is... Yet they continue to struggle to make operating expenses.
I walk past Imgur's office reasonably often. There's a slightly crumpled-up, inkjet-printed piece of paper with their logo on it, taped to the glass of the front door.
Makes me chuckle every time, I hope they don't blow any of this on a fancy door sign.
I'm really interested in this deal. It's always been a bit of an enigma to me how imgur makes money, especially since they have been bootstrapping. I wonder if the numbers looked good to a16z, or if they saw the incredible growth potential of having a large interest in the youtube of images (as frade33 characterized it).
The bandwidth now is cheap, when I launched Image Socket I was on two dedicated machines at FDC that served closed to a thousand requests per second.
The revenue on advertisements would be 10x (from what I recall) of what I spend on the hardware.
The trick is to approach the problem smartly via bandwidth control techniques (ip rate limiting, proper bandwidth queues via ipfilter, etc) and identify abuse early.
In 2014, their margins would be (again my opinion) double of what mine where.
Hardware is cheaper, bandwidth is cheaper and you have easier access to really fast and complex caching solutions.
It looks like in 2012 they transferred 42PB of data, which is pretty crazy. I assume their numbers are far higher now. It's impressive they can make it all work.
I didn't know that Reddit had invested money in the company either, that could potentially be a pretty big boon for them.
If I remember correctly they use Cloudflare quite a bit. This probably decreases their actual traffic by a tremendous amount, since they vast majority of their bandwidth comes from easily cacheable images.
Don't you know? HostGator gives you unlimited bandwidth? :)
Realistically, bandwidth is relatively cheap and the type of advertising they show on Imgur is likely pretty expensive. Anything to do with home buying (what I've been seeing lately) is usually pretty expensive CPC-wise.
I'm looking forward to see what they come up with, the first thought that hits me is "how are they going to make money?". Reddit is clearly not profitable, how do they differentiate from a business perspective?
Imgur has been profitable since the beginning[1]. There are massive differences business and infrastructure-wise between Reddit and Imgur. Imgur has much better ad/pageview ratio than Reddit and is much less dynamic and infrastructure heavy.
My guess is that they're probably going to spend some time building their own CDN / image storage. I think they used some combination of dedicated servers, RDBMS, CloudFlare, and AWS.
They could save some significant operating costs, without sacrificing a lot of of customer happiness by putting together their own datacenter, and hosting a handful of edge sites (a rack or two, and then fast failover out of the rack). I imagine that the traffic curve on images drops off pretty quickly after a point, and stays down.
imgur should shoot big and host videos. Let people upload videos without an account, just like images. Fuck YouTube and its toxic comments. imgur's comment system and quality of comments are way better.
If imgur approaches Youtube's scale won't the comments on imgur also become toxic?
This still appears to be an unsolved issue (although, one could argue whether it is really an "issue"). Google's G+ approach (barring anonymous comments, etc) does not appear to have addressed the core concern.
i have been getting tired of all interface complications on youtube, I think this would be a welcome place for interesting and funny videos - old you tube style. number of things I have too look at and click to get to my channels is slowly growing which is pita.
Although I tried using imgur a few times, I could not upload images a number of times, subjectively I don't know how they get that much money for such service... bubble is it?
[+] [-] bane|12 years ago|reply
Try to make a similar service today and get growth on reddit the same way and you'll likely get added to the global spam block list.
Reddit has also invested an undisclosed amount, which Mr. Schaaf said was “very small in comparison.” Regardless of size, the investment from Reddit represents a formal business connection between two entities that have so far shared only a legacy and community.
Imgur was originally created as a gift to the Reddit community for easy image sharing, and now has grown to be larger than Reddit itself, pulling in over three billion monthly pageviews. What began as a platform for uploading images, Imgur has become a vibrant and shrewd community of commenters, uploaders and up-voters.
edit
Here's the origin in case anybody's interested
http://www.reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_cre...
If you look at MrGrim's early post history, it's a blatant violation of reddit's anti-spam rule. However, it was (and is) insanely useful and entirely disrupted the image hosting "industry". Even today, the vast majority of MrGrim's posts are imgur posts, which is an explicit violation of the "rules".
It's not a knock against imgur or reddit (I love both), just an interesting observation.
You can violate the rules if you're not obviously a bad actor. In this case, imgur and MrGrim was clearly spam, but it wasn't the bad kind of spam that everybody hates, it was the good kind of marketing where people actually get something useful from the exchange.
edit #2
IIR imgur also had an explicit no porn policy for a very long while, except for NSFW reddits.
edit #3 and an AmA
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur_...
[+] [-] Sir_Cmpwn|12 years ago|reply
- No ads
- Open source
- Extremely transparent
The opinion of Reddit's userbase was almost universally positive.
However, the Reddit admins did not like that at all. They banned the domain for weeks right after launch, and only unbanned it after quite a lot of begging. They also shadowbanned my personal account for a while, and that wasn't too easy to get lifted, either.
They're very hostile to anything but Imgur these days. Hell, I worry about writing this here, because if they see it, we might get into another round of bullshit with them.
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|12 years ago|reply
So lets say I went out and created a competing service, which is something I've considered. Now the reddit admins will ban me for violating the rules while MrGrim gets a free pass because of community politics.
Its incredible to me that reddit sells itself as being above the fray and an alternative to sites that had more patronage, when its a lot of ' meet the old boss, same as the old boss.' I suspect popular sites have a typical lifecycle. Launch, buzz, a golden period, then a decay once monetization becomes a concern, then another group of hungry 20 somethings eats its lunch.
[+] [-] sheetjs|12 years ago|reply
... and a very tolerant reddit user base.
Even though direct links to images are available, many people share the imgur page link instead (with the intention of helping imgur show more ads)
[+] [-] lawnchair_larry|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbesto|12 years ago|reply
As Gabe Newell once said "You can't lie on Reddit".
[+] [-] genwin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkstar999|12 years ago|reply
I completely disagree. Unless you are being scammy, spammy, or otherwise violating reddit rules, you'd be fine.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] terpua|12 years ago|reply
Looks like imgur's "lucky moment" was Reddit admins allowing it despite it being "spam".
[+] [-] yuhong|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] korzun|12 years ago|reply
It became extremely successful in just a few days due to support from another (popular at the time) web site called SomethingAwful.
Alternatives at the time sucked. Unfortunately I failed to pivot it into something that does not rely exclusively on one or two popular web sites as it's source of traffic.
Congrats to Imgur for jumping on Reddit early and a becoming somewhat independent at this point.
It's funny that I had an opportunity to compete with them because my site was already build and widely utilized when Reddit came out but I never imaged that Reddit would blow up so fast and by the time it did, competing with Imgur was impossible.
[+] [-] frade33|12 years ago|reply
And speaking of profits, 140 Characters is barely generating any revenue despite it would be the only service of its size consuming the least (hosting) resources.
So I guess investors do not see the value in profits rather in popularity when it comes to crazy start-ups. Considering Instagram which got acquired for the ‘notorious’ 1 Billion. If we use the same mathematical formula, I guess imgur is worth at least 2x of Instagram.
[+] [-] bane|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stickydink|12 years ago|reply
Makes me chuckle every time, I hope they don't blow any of this on a fancy door sign.
[+] [-] allsystemsgo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jscheel|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rgbrgb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ozh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] korzun|12 years ago|reply
The revenue on advertisements would be 10x (from what I recall) of what I spend on the hardware.
The trick is to approach the problem smartly via bandwidth control techniques (ip rate limiting, proper bandwidth queues via ipfilter, etc) and identify abuse early.
In 2014, their margins would be (again my opinion) double of what mine where.
Hardware is cheaper, bandwidth is cheaper and you have easier access to really fast and complex caching solutions.
[+] [-] LandoCalrissian|12 years ago|reply
I didn't know that Reddit had invested money in the company either, that could potentially be a pretty big boon for them.
[+] [-] Splendor|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DangerousPie|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IgorPartola|12 years ago|reply
Realistically, bandwidth is relatively cheap and the type of advertising they show on Imgur is likely pretty expensive. Anything to do with home buying (what I've been seeing lately) is usually pretty expensive CPC-wise.
[+] [-] ilaksh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] werid|12 years ago|reply
My reddit usage is more directly into specific communities, less of the general sub-reddits.
[+] [-] michaelmcmillan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nols|12 years ago|reply
1 http://www.neowin.net/news/from-rags-to-riches-the-story-of-...
[+] [-] sargun|12 years ago|reply
They could save some significant operating costs, without sacrificing a lot of of customer happiness by putting together their own datacenter, and hosting a handful of edge sites (a rack or two, and then fast failover out of the rack). I imagine that the traffic curve on images drops off pretty quickly after a point, and stays down.
[+] [-] ztratar|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _zen|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrollaway|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] svas|12 years ago|reply
This still appears to be an unsolved issue (although, one could argue whether it is really an "issue"). Google's G+ approach (barring anonymous comments, etc) does not appear to have addressed the core concern.
[+] [-] perlpimp|12 years ago|reply
Although I tried using imgur a few times, I could not upload images a number of times, subjectively I don't know how they get that much money for such service... bubble is it?
[+] [-] cmelbye|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xpop2027|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] binaryjohn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notastartup|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] baldfat|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Consultant32452|12 years ago|reply