Looks great, and clearly a lot of time and thought invested. Not news to you, I'm sure, but these sites typically only last for a while. Because nobody has really hit on a way to subsidize a reasonable free plan enough to pay for the bandwidth it collectively consumes, and to implement enough spam protection. Especially once it hits a certain adoption curve. So they either die or find a way to push ads, like imgur did. This is so nice though, I'm really rooting for it to find a way.
Exactly; I still remember reading the imgur announcement post on reddit which had all the same descriptions. They were ad free and they were aiming to be great forever. Now though they're the "big bad".
In 2016, Imgur raised $40 million in funding from investors, valuing the company at around $500 million. In 2021, Imgur was acquired by the media company, MediaLab, for an undisclosed amount, reportedly around $200-300 million. Alan Schaaf, the CEO and founder, reportedly owned around 40% of the company at the time of the acquisition, which would have netted him a significant amount, estimated to be around $80-120 million.
why does everybody here think that imgur is a failure in light of OP's stated goals? His stated goals are the same as imgur's stated goals. The imgur outcome is the stated goal of most of the people here.
"why does everybody here think that imgur is a failure"
Because what everyone on the internet wants is a place that will just friggin hold images and respond to HTTP requests with that image
"in light of OP's stated goals"
because op seems to want to build a sustainable business, but at a certain scale it just becomes unsustainable because you become a CDN that is paid for per-seat. So they will inevitably need to either not scale (which makes them not what the internet wants), or scale by either becoming Cloudflare or becoming a social networking site, so that they can either pay their bills via usage-based-billing or pay their bills via sweaty VC money.
So the goal is to make another unsustainable business, make everyone use and love it, then sell it to someone who will make it uterly shitty with the hopes of squeezing at least a bit of money out of the people who now rely on it, before it inevitably dies?
I’d argue that having a service that exists in any form is a success. The fact it’s used so heavily despite your opinions and being loaded with ads means people value it and are better off than if it never existed. If the creator here could create the same but with no monetary upside directly, even just having the notoriety and putting it on his resume would translate to dollars indirectly. It’s a side project, chill.
Plenty of ways to send an image to it - right click image in Finder, share menu on iOS from photos etc, replaced the built in macOS shortcuts for taking screenshots with Dropshare so a quick upload button to share a screenshot.
That combined with pointing a subdomain at the r2 bucket means I can share images virtually instantly without thinking too hard about it (the r2 URL is copied to clipboard once the image is uploaded). Having a personalised vanity domain is a cherry on top too http://img.cohan.dev/AXsaG.jpg
Also means it's on me to make sure images are available in the future and I trust me to keep my images online forever more than sites that have to find a way to fund themselves eventually.
Thanks! It's been operating for the past 3 years without any ads or third-party trackers, and I don't have plans to shut it down for the forseeable future.
No one ever starts these things with plans to shut them down, the question is how much money do you have for this right now, how much money is it burning per unit of time, and how long will that last if no one pays for a paid plan. I'm not asking you to answer those questions, but pointing out the reality of the economics of the situation. If an image goes viral, can you pay a 10x or 100x hosting bill? For how long? How much are you commiting to spend before shutting it down becomes an attractive option?
These are good questions to ask. Right now, the monetization strategy is profitable.
If an image does go viral, which has happened before on popular Reddit posts that hit the front page, the infrastructure should be able to handle it for a while, and it should not be costly.
I can, right now, go find dedicated servers with 1gbps port that will deliver continuous 800Mbps of traffic 24x7, for $35/month. Bandwidth is not as expensive as people think.
I made one of these back in 2005 and it was inevitably gangloaded with questionable content like p*rn, malware, software license keys, copyrighted material, etc.
Just p*rn?
You can consider yourself lucky.
One week after publishing my own public instance of an IMGUR-like, I woke up with +150 emails from my host provider and a final one telling me that they had shutdown my server.
Someone had posted ~500 pictures of "naked kids", a Canadian bot had found them and notified my host provider, who automatically took action.
Everything happened in less than 30 minutes, between the first picture being uploaded and the server being shutdown.
First I tried to restart the server and clean it, but I received new notifications as soon as it was online. So I just restored the last backup before it all started.
And I removed the ability for public users to upload pictures.
I will never ever publish a service allowing user to upload publicly any content.
