
Imgur Raises $40M From Andreessen Horowitz - jmduke
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/03/imgur-image-sharing-site-raises-40-million-from-andreessen-horowitz/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
======
bane
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._

 _edit_

Here's the origin in case anybody's interested

[http://www.reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_cre...](http://www.reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting)

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_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur_ama/)

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
I have tried to build a similar service
([https://mediacru.sh](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.

~~~
korzun
You either did something questionable or broke the rules.

Also in reality, you have no chance trying to compete with Imgur on their own
home turf especially that late in the game.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
The feature we brought to the table to compete with was turning GIFs into
HTML5 video, so they save bandwidth and get extra features. This seems to be
doing pretty well, though another competitor has shown up and seems to be
doing better than we are in that space - even though they offer an inferior
service.

As for questionably breaking the rules, we pretty much followed in Imgur's
footsteps. Even if this was too much, it hardly justifies the crucification we
received.

~~~
korzun
The difference is that you were too late in the game.

When image hosting started blowing up alternatives to Imgur were horrible,
horrible ad farms with low quality images that took several seconds to load.

Comparing to what Imgur brings to the table and what you bring to the table,
the different is not that drastic.

Also you can't compare rules Reddit has in place now with rules it had years
ago.

There has been weeks where multiple image providers with shitty off the shelf
solutions would be doing same thing you were trying to do after seeing Imgur
take off every single day.

Like I said, it's just too late at this point. Find another market.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Thanks for the discouragement, but I'll continue trying. We aren't doing so
bad now:
[http://www.reddit.com/domain/mediacru.sh/new](http://www.reddit.com/domain/mediacru.sh/new)

There has been a great response to "HTML5 GIFs", though. Many people are very
eager to use them instead of Imgur. The problem we face there is that a
competing service has shown up and attracted more attention without
consequence from the Reddit admins, so we're trying to get back into that
area.

~~~
thenewbtg
@Sir as a long time reddit user, your total blameshifting of your services
inability to compete with gfycat, coming right after listening to you
blameshift on why you couldn't compete with imgur, stinks to high heaven from
here.

At what point do you accept responsibility for the success and failure of your
ability to create a service and make it popular?

At what point do you stop externalizing the blame and get down to the hard
task (or simply lucky outcome) of succeeding?

For what it's worth, I just made a gfycat of a youtube video to share with my
mom. So I decided to do the exact same process for your service that you tout
as superior to gfycat.

With gfycat, it was super simple to paste the youtube link, select the time
frame and output the html5 video/gif. Done in under a minute. Your service has
not actually completed an "upload" of the youtube video from a link no matter
how long I've waited. Whenever I click on the random floating microphone near
the top left of your services homepage, I simply see "an error occurred". I
don't know how long I'm supposed to wait for this to work, but I just made 3
more youtube->gfycats while waiting.

I'm not lying, here are the 3 youtube -> gfycats that finished while your
service says "uploading" without a progress bar at all (gfycat has a working
progress bar so I can helpfully tell that it downloads the youtube video in
about 10-15 seconds).
[http://gfycat.com/UnitedGoodnaturedArcherfish](http://gfycat.com/UnitedGoodnaturedArcherfish)
[http://www.gfycat.com/RemoteWelltodoLadybird](http://www.gfycat.com/RemoteWelltodoLadybird)
[http://www.gfycat.com/FeminineCapitalCob](http://www.gfycat.com/FeminineCapitalCob)

No offense but gfycat obviously blows your service out of the water, so
perhaps you should play catch-up instead of blaming reddit admins? Which is
silly anyway, because gfycat succeeds through comments and people sharing it
and talking about it, not through owner spam or something else.

For the record it's been over 10 minutes since I began a youtube -> html5
conversion on your site and it still says "uploading" and I think it's broken.

~~~
thenewbtg
"MediaCrush is an objectively better service in almost every way imaginable. "

I disagree. You're very protective of your work and obviously deluded to the
quality. It's a shame.

As a reddit user I will continue to use gfycat as in my 25 minutes of testing
over 5 different sources, gfycat worked in under 15 seconds and for 100% of
the time, and provides an objectively superior feature set at every stage of
the process.

At this point I don't even know what you support. You don't list it on your
webpage (gfycat does), and you don't fail when bad input is brought in (gfycat
does). You don't give a progress report for uploads (gfycat does) and you
don't support speed changing on html5 videos (gfycat does). Your service
brands all pages with your logo and naviagation links, gfycat hides the entire
UI except for at certain times, for a much much cleaner look that almost
appears like a native gif.

Just did multiple gifs as a test and gfycat is just objectively much faster at
uploading and encoding. Gfycat finishes the whole process while your service
says "pending" before it begins! I'm sorry, I don't see a single way your
service is better. Maybe outline them instead of just claiming it is?

Sorry you don't agree. Keep blaming admins, I'm sure that'll help you build a
truly competitive service.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
I wrote three responses to this comment, and three times you edited it. I'm
not going to try for a fourth.

Update: Actually, there are some points you've edited in that I need to refute
here to prevent the spread of misinformation.

>Your service brands all images with your logo, gfycat hides it except for at
certain times, for a much cleaner look.

What? No, we don't do anything like that. What on Earth are you talking about?

>You don't give a progress report for uploads

Yes we do.

~~~
thenewbtg
>"What? No, we don't do anything like that. What on Earth are you talking
about?"

I mean that if you view a gfycat it's a totally white page, if you view a
mediacrush your logo and navigation are all over the page. Gfycat appears
unbranded most of the time, your service does not.

As for progress bar, gfycat shows you a real-time indication of the status of
the upload. Yours is a dummy progress bar that gives no indication of progress
and will run even if the service is doing nothing (as the "we don't support
youtubes we just 'upload' endlessly until you quit" test proved to me).

Your fake progress bar and lack of error handling caused me to wait 20 minutes
to upload a video for converting with zero indication that there was anything
amiss. As I performed during my test, gfycat handled multiple youtubes and
large gifs (1-10MB) in under 5 minutes total, while I waited 20+ minutes on
Mediacrush before giving up on many of my inputs.

I had to contact a creator of the service to find out it didn't support one of
the most popular and most used features of the competitor he claims to be
superior to!

I understand I'm downvoted, I understand this community is rewarding you.

But sorry buddy: outside of HN, Gfycat beat you with a superior service. Not
because of the admins, but because users like me who willingly make the
choice. Who submit links from gfycat not mediacrush. Who convert everything we
see into gfycat. Because we compare services with videos, large gifs, small
gifs and everything in between and pick what we like best. You didn't convince
me: quite the opposite, you attacked me for judging your service and took zero
criticism fairly, even when gfycat is easily and objectively better in the
eyes of the users who you have to win over to see any viral success in
subreddits. To see someone say "we're superior in every way" is such a
heartbreak to me. How can you compete if you're unwilling to have fair
perspective?

I will promote gfycat on reddit comments wildly, as I have in the past, as so
many hundreds of users have loudly and strongly done so-- and thats why gfycat
will succeed. Because of users like me who go into comments and convert every
gif and video to gfycat and become the most upvoted comments. Gfycat succeeds
because of viral attraction to it.

All the best luck, but you might consider adding basic error handling,
upgrading your UI to meet parity with gfycat, and might want to add features
like youtube if you want to compete. You can find legal reasons why you can't,
but that just means I pick gfycat over mediacrush every single time. Your
legal concerns are not mine-- I want the best service, not the "most proper"
service or whatever. I'd move quick though, gfycat is already moving to become
a mainstay in many video/image subreddits and your window to displace it is
closing faster than you might believe.

------
korzun
I build image hosting service which was 'great' for it's time (2006) called
Image Socket ([http://www.imagesocket.com](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.

------
frade33
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.

~~~
bane
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.

~~~
cloudwalking
Run rate and valuation are not always directly tied. In all of these cases--
Twitter, Instagram, Imgur, Reddit, 9GAG--it's about the community.

Reddit may certainly be worth $1B+, but no acquirer wants to buy them and lose
money keeping the site up.

~~~
bane
Well yeah, but they arguably should be part of the valuation model. I realize
there's a lot of speculation, past investment history, etc. involved in the
valuation, but at some point how much money a company is making and can
realistically make should be part of the figuring.

------
stickydink
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.

~~~
allsystemsgo
maybe they'll get a frame for it.

------
jscheel
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).

~~~
rgbrgb
They make money by showing ads that get millions of views per day and most
likely selling information about their users.

~~~
jscheel
Well, duh ;) I'm just impressed, given the significant bandwidth, that the
advertising has been capable of sustaining itself so far.

~~~
rgbrgb
A high traffic image sharing site can actually be pretty cheap to run.
Cloudflare gives you an unlimited bandwidth CDN and incoming bandwidth to S3
is free (uploads can be done directly from the browser).

Source: I help run [https://surfer.io/](https://surfer.io/)

~~~
Kudos
I think your idea of high traffic is pretty low, Cloudflare will expect you to
be on the enterprise plan when you have actual high traffic.

~~~
erichocean
…which is, on average, $5K/month. Not exactly a ton of money.

~~~
Kudos
An average without context is not useful information.

When I last checked, a sample price for Cloudflare is $3k for 100TB.
Cloudflare is far from the cheap option when it comes to serving content.

------
ozh
I don't get how such a bandwidth hog can run only off a few ads.

~~~
LandoCalrissian
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.

~~~
Matsta
They use Edgecast's CDN (which is now owned by Verizon?)

[https://www.edgecast.com/company/news/edgecast-powers-
imgur](https://www.edgecast.com/company/news/edgecast-powers-imgur)

Off the top of my head, I think they offer their bigger clients pricing of
$0.02-0.04 per gigabyte. I could be wrong though.

44040192gb *0.02 = $880,803 / 12 = $73,400/month.

~~~
linuxydave
Looks like they don't anymore

$ curl -sI [http://i.imgur.com/S1iGm2E.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/S1iGm2E.jpg) |
grep Server

Server: cloudflare-nginx

------
werid
These days, I goto imgur frontpage to view the gallery, viewing the daily
"funnies" is not done via reddit anymore.

My reddit usage is more directly into specific communities, less of the
general sub-reddits.

------
michaelmcmillan
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?

~~~
nols
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.

1 [http://www.neowin.net/news/from-rags-to-riches-the-story-
of-...](http://www.neowin.net/news/from-rags-to-riches-the-story-of-imgur)

------
sargun
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.

~~~
ztratar
With their traffic, AWS is not cost effective in the least.

~~~
stevekemp
With their traffic I'm sure they haggled a better deal than the default AWS
prices..

------
_zen
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.

~~~
scrollaway
The site Sir_Cmpn linked above ([https://mediacru.sh](https://mediacru.sh))
apparently allows video uploads.

------
notastartup
where is Andreesen's email? I want to ask him if he wants to invest in my
startup.

------
baldfat
Raises = gifted and never will see a return of investment????

~~~
Consultant32452
Marc Andreessen is on the board of Facebook. My guess is he wants to pump it
up and then get Facebook to buy them.

~~~
foobarqux
Like Oculus?

