> a clean, simple, easy to use image hosting service that everyone could use for free
How do you monetize such a site without bloating into the current Imgur?
It seems like the only way to have a "clean, simple, easy" image hosting service is to be a billionaire and to do it out of the goodness of your heart.
That's what the lore tells us, but maybe it's just plain wrong and the old incumbents were just greedy and terrible. I think imgur was bootstrapped for a long time and didn't have much in the way of monetization, certainly hotlinking still worked then.
Hi! I'll admit it's poorly worded. My intention was to say there was an economic value in providing less-than-cost (or even free -- only you and your accountants knew) bandwidth in order to scale out your network and increase value to customers paying much more.
though not as often today as in times past, there are points where 10Gbps is more expensive overall than 20 or 30Gbps.
Getting high traffic customers like Imgur allowed us to negotiate better commits, establish new peering and interconnection agreements, and otherwise lower the "unit costs" of the network we built.
It was generally never worth it to do this for free, but you're spot on that in certain cases it was worth it to do it for less than (current) per unit costs.
Oh wow you guys re-branded. You could do with a landing page knocking about somewhere mentioning your old name! I was trying to dig through the web fairly recently trying to find you (Knowing you'd survived hosting imgur for at least a time!)
I guess traffic gets a lot cheaper beyond a certain volume. I suspect it's dollars/TB to cents/TB? So they can cut prices for their offerings and have more revenue and growth due to paying less for the traffic. Having these volumes of data also allows them to approach potential clients with some solid data (e.g. we serve 1/5 of image clicks on the net every day and below 20ms response time... I have no data, just speculation)
I could imagine that imgur traffic paid for itself.
I send 5Gbps to an eyeball network (let's say Comcast, for the sake of discussion) it might cost me $5000/month to do that through my transit provider (intentionally inflated cost). Comcast will interconnect, settlement free, to networks who exchange 7 or more Gbps. Three optics and three cross connects are $3000 + $600/month.
How much is that additional 2Gbps of traffic (to Comcast) worth?
How do you monetize such a site without bloating into the current Imgur?
It seems like the only way to have a "clean, simple, easy" image hosting service is to be a billionaire and to do it out of the goodness of your heart.