How Imgur Became a Photo Sharing Hit

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-23/how-imgur-became-a-photo-sharing-hit

by vinhnx • 12 years ago

57 35 12 years ago

Now that Andreessen invested a huge amount in them, I'm counting the days until it's being acquired by Facebook. Seems to be his modus operandi. An easy 20x ROI with this strategy.

drunkcatsdgaf• 12 years ago

I feel like facebook is a giant orgy of startups now.

sixQuarks• 12 years ago

That's the whole point. They know that social networks are not stable in the long run. They are now a new type of tech company, one with a huge pocket (in stock), and willing to make big bets with it.

Facebook is a tech rollup, and in my opinion, if they keep absorbing the most promising startups (and allow them to run independently), they could be a trillion dollar company with FB the social network making up less than 10% of that market value.

mikecb• 12 years ago

What do you think the bid would be? I'm thinking 100 billion.

cdelsolar• 12 years ago

nah, I think it would be closer to 1-2 trillion.

kalleboo• 12 years ago

How Imgur Became a Photo-Sharing Hit: They didn't rate limit or show ads to referers from reddit.com.

Before imgur we had imageshack.us which built it's success on forums.somethingawful.com. ImageShack's attempt at jumping on the Next Big Thing, yfrog.com, was thwarted when twitter added their own image sharing.

endianswap• 12 years ago

Was Imageshack the one that was hosted on several different volunteers' servers? I remember back in the day being a part of a goon-run image hosting service and I can't remember which one it was. In the one I'm remembering when you'd go to e.g. imageshack.us/image it'd send you to e.g. kalleboo.imageshack.us/image for the real hosting of that image.

LukeB_UK• 12 years ago

I think that was waffleimages.

swang• 12 years ago

No that was WaffleImages. It was built after Macbeth tried to monetize by spamming SA.

minimaxir• 12 years ago

For context, they are showing ads to referers from social media websites (Facebook/Twitter/G+). (Wrote a blog post about it here: http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/moved-temporarily/ )

If they did that in Reddit, hilarity would ensue.

neotek• 12 years ago

They do, to a degree. When you view an imgur gallery in the Alien Blue reddit app, it now redirects you to the imgur mobile view which is clumsy to use and has ads.

criswell• 12 years ago

Fast, useful and easy to use.

bluedino2• 12 years ago

ImageShack had a problem with people directly linking images, since that doesn't allow them to show ads, so they changed things around and SA didn't like it, then they blocked each other, the SA admins attempted to make a local copy of any image that was hosted there, to preserve Photoshop Phriday and other threads...

A couple of people on SA ran WaffleImages for a while, where any user could donate a server to host images, but that didn't last for too long.

gcb0• 12 years ago

nope. several others did that. imgurl just got integrated in reddit. nothing else at all.

nowadays when i click i link to them i just see all the garbage and useless interface load... get tired and leave before the image (last thing to load on the page) shows up.

oh, and this is a paid article.

yelnatz• 12 years ago

Imageshack was used widely in reddit.

The problem was it couldn't handle the load and the link would just die. If a link would become semi popular, it would pretty much kill the imageshack source with certainty.

This was the main selling point of imgur. It didn't suck.

Relic22799• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure it wasn't that popular even back then (5-7 years ago). I recall users being chided for not using flickr because of how badly imageshack sucked. Imageshack was great for images you wanted to share on small/mid sized internet forums, but flickr was probably the biggest/best until imgur dethroned them. Yahoo! buying flickr probably didn't help much either. Though that's only anecdotal, I never used flickr enough to notice.

funkyy• 12 years ago

The main problem at its core was that ImageShack was made for profit - while Imgur was bootstrapping as much as it could. Its not like those free services cant exist bootstrapping - its that founders need to do really good job saving money everywhere they can, avoiding profit and having some money in the bank account so whatever happens they wont panic. Sometimes when you see today start-up culture it seems like some people are not serious. Spending loadz of money on some unimportant services, parties, meetings, hotels etc. Its not like servers these days are crazy expensive - any startup could easily grown on Amazon/Softlayer with backup server from OVH. It wont ruin your budget as long as you commit yourself to spend money on what's important for 1-2 years until you get some funding or ads going on.

thejosh• 12 years ago

Imgur is one of those sites where noone believed it would last, due to the vast amount of money it takes to run a site like that (at the time) and it being the main way people posted images to reddit.

Glad to see it has lasted and has a community built around images posted from reddit. :)

bluedino2• 12 years ago

Reddit can also be hostile to other image hosts

X-Istence• 12 years ago

A lot of that has to do with the fact that other image hosts are slow!

fafner• 12 years ago

As the article mentions most image hosts simply don't scale to the reddit user base and once an image gets too popular they either pull it or break down under the load. And more importantly many other image hosts add aggressive advertisement and don't allow direct linking. (Imgur recently started to redirect direct image links to the normal image view which has ads for referrals not from reddit though.)

I think the other image hoster which is similar is http://minus.com/. (And min.us, unlike imgur, does not downscale images or force convert PNG to JPEG or increases JPEG compression. Although I think you can prevent imgur from doing this with a "premium account".)

edit: Someone also mentioned https://mediacru.sh/ which is open source.

pyvpx• 12 years ago

what people seem to gloss over is he/they had good friends at Voxel (iirc) which was a growing CDN. they gave him bandwidth on the cheap in the hopes they're traffic would surge. it did, and everyone was happy.

if imageshack could have made the numbers work with a performant CDN back then, they'd have made the cut and we'd probably be talking about something else :)

georgiecasey• 12 years ago

Imgur is one of those sites where noone believed it would last, due to the vast amount of money it takes to run a site like that (at the time)

Like Youtube when I first came across it in 2005. I thought either bandwidth costs or legal claims would kill it within months.

bane• 12 years ago

I think it's worth revisiting the discussion we had here a while ago when they rose their VC. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7524216

oneweirdtrick• 12 years ago

I am surprised there was no mention in the article of Imgur stripping Exif data off of uploads. To me that seems like a nice bonus.

subdane• 12 years ago

They solved a problem for a highly engaged network, making it simple to post and share an image in formats necessary for forums and not tied to identity. The first time I used Imgur, it was so simple, so delightful and so not monetized I wondered how it would last.

fancy_betta• 12 years ago

They monetize the hell out of it now. A few times a day I click an imgur link and the page will show the image for a fraction of a second before forwarding to a full-page ad. It won't last much longer before someone else comes along with something less annoying and fewer ads.

knome• 12 years ago

I've never seen a fullpage ad on imgur. They've got sidebar ads, and the occasional promoted image, but never an overlay or popup.

If you're getting the latter, you might want to scan for malware.

scrollaway• 12 years ago

In another article a few days ago, someone mentioned mediacrush (https://mediacru.sh/) which is an open source alternative to imgur. After the rumors about a sale to Yahoo, I personally prefer an open source site to have my data rather than Yahoo...

ithought• 12 years ago

When I log into my Flickr account, it says my account has been recycled after too much inactivity. My URL username is different than my account name and I'm unsure if it's actually linked to another Yahoo account. But that account is either my real name Yahoo ID or my real name @ymail.com. Yahoo just referred to one username as "96b2a95890acd0cb201aaeb385f6482e". I can't log in, can't reset the accounts, and am confused by what is what.

Of course, ultimately it is my fault but my photos are stuck. They are still online in low resolution.

sheetjs• 12 years ago

Active discussion on reddit from yesterday: http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2409uc/til_im...

dosh• 12 years ago

Imgur combined with bufferapp makes a great use case for running twitter accounts.

How Imgur Became a Photo Sharing Hit

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