I'm surprised one of the big companies (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon), or one of the world's governments doesn't start up a simple image hosting site with direct linking, and foot the bill in exchange for tracking everyone, and having more of the world under their umbrella, visiting daily.
I'm assuming those companies also have the infrastructure to reduce bandwidth expenses, and they could accept the loss in the short term, to have a well established service and community for when imaging hosting becomes more profitable in the future.
A simple image hosting service is relatively quick to develop, and it's almost guaranteed to be one of the most used services on the internet. Why are these companies wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on all sorts of failed projects, when they could easily win this market?
Hosting an image site means you're responsible for its content. That means you need to have some policy for dealing with all the copyright infringement, child porn, racial hatred, leaked celebrity nudes, shock images, etc. It's a potential lightning rod for brand damage.
Note that all of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, & Amazon already allow you to host your own photos but aren't used in this way.
(Everyone has more or less given up on copyright enforcement for images, possibly because there's no central enforcement mafia, but that doesn't mean it's not still the law)
I'm assuming those companies also have the infrastructure to reduce bandwidth expenses, and they could accept the loss in the short term, to have a well established service and community for when imaging hosting becomes more profitable in the future.
A simple image hosting service is relatively quick to develop, and it's almost guaranteed to be one of the most used services on the internet. Why are these companies wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on all sorts of failed projects, when they could easily win this market?