I'm more interested in how imgur survives since they serve up far more bandwidth that reddit does and their own advertising and community efforts are pretty young relatively, not to mention hotlinks bypass that entirely.
Imgur uses the free/extremely cheap CDN Cloudflare. Same with 4chan. The vast majority of Imgur's content gets served at the CDN layer so Imgur doesn't have to pay for that bandwidth.
moot (of 4chan) said a while back that Cloudflare is one of the main reasons 4chan is still around these days.
Bandwidth have been going down for years. I don't think they release numbers but the community in imgur is pretty active. There's a lot of people browsing imgur directly (they have a voting system, comments...) and know nothing about reddit.
They have a lot of direct traffic to compensate for the cheap hotlinking.
I constantly wonder about this....and I was willing to pay them for an account -- which they they axed and made it free for all. How can that be sustainable, how?!
another interesting fact is that reddit just last week released api functionality to access reddits cache of all thumbnails and native resolution of post images on their own infrastructure.
Of course they've must have cached thumbnails before but this seems like a giant expansion that must consume rather much resources... or maybe they did this before and just didn't expose the functionality, but it seems tied to their new mobile webpage
Reddit is owned by a billion dollar company, and does not need to be profitable. Especially with all the marketing going through the front page every single day, it's an advertisers paradise. I don't think they're hurting for money.
Contrary to popular belief Reddit is not some grass-roots operations.
> Reddit is owned by a billion dollar company, and does not need to be profitable.
Tell that to Myspace. A property as expensive as reddit has to have a clear road to profitability or it's going to get the axe. Conde Nast isn't running a charity.
meritt|10 years ago
billmalarky|10 years ago
moot (of 4chan) said a while back that Cloudflare is one of the main reasons 4chan is still around these days.
Adirael|10 years ago
They have a lot of direct traffic to compensate for the cheap hotlinking.
ChrisArchitect|10 years ago
mhomde|10 years ago
Of course they've must have cached thumbnails before but this seems like a giant expansion that must consume rather much resources... or maybe they did this before and just didn't expose the functionality, but it seems tied to their new mobile webpage
sergiotapia|10 years ago
Contrary to popular belief Reddit is not some grass-roots operations.
minimaxir|10 years ago
aspir|10 years ago
Tell that to Myspace. A property as expensive as reddit has to have a clear road to profitability or it's going to get the axe. Conde Nast isn't running a charity.