

New Image Upload Support (Stack Overflow and Imgur) - SandB0x
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/new-image-upload-support/

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nostromo
What always amazes me on reddit is how Imgur has seemingly convinced the
entire community that it is some sort of friendly not-for-profit. Having
talked with someone who runs a much smaller image hosting service, they are
usually quite profitable and I'm sure Alan Schaaf is bringing home a healthy
paycheck.

And good for him, by the way. I appreciate Imgur's simple interface. I do
however wonder how much the reddit community (which seems violently anti-
capitalist anymore) will stand behind him as they come to the realization that
he's likely making a fair amount of money on the site. Maybe even more money
than reddit. ;-)

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Simucal
I'm curious about what Imgur costs to run. I've read that he is paying for
100mb unmetered. He is burning up a ton of bandwidth, thats for sure.

Also, I wonder what is in the stackexechange deal for imgur? All images will
be displayed inline, with no ads.

~~~
nostromo
The link (in the comments) states that Imgur offered it free to StackOverflow.
My guess is that the images will automatically be linked to Imgur where he'll
show ads.

If quantcast is anywhere near right, he's showing 20mm-30mm pageviews a month.
At $5EPM (that's probably high) for 20mm (low according to quantcast) that's
$100k a month. Remember that the "awesome images from other sites" is also an
ad. He also fires pixels to ad networks, like scorecardresearch.com and
crowdscience.com to add a little extra "ad-less" earnings to the bottom line.

On his stats page he says bandwidth used in the past month was 165TB, which on
S3 would cost $16,500 plus more for storage used, however I bet he's getting a
good deal from Voxel.

Update: those may not be ad networks after all -- I'm not sure. If anyone
knows more about those companies, I'd love to learn more.

~~~
nl
I think your traffic estimates are reasonable. <http://imgur.com/stats/> says
he serves around 45m images a day. I'd suspect 1 in 10 generates an ad view,
so call it 500K page views/day = 15m/month.

But there's no way he's getting $5 EPM for a photosharing site. Here's someone
selling ads on his photo site for well under $1 EPM:
<http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/listings/76918>. I haven't looked at his
site in detail, but I think the actual rate is $0.17 EPM. Say 0.50 EPM

15m/month pageviews * 0.50 EPM = $7500. Need to subtract bandwidth costs from
that.

~~~
nostromo
That's fair -- especially since they don't seem to run as many ads as some
sites. ($0.75 with 5 ads and ad targeting pixels, etc., can really ad up.)

