Imageshack was in the same position 5 years ago. And Photobucket 3 years before that. Image hosts go through a cycle of upending the tyrant and then becoming the villain.
Ugh. Don’t remind me. I used yfrog (Imageshack’s Twitter-friendly brand) for years, and now I have probably hundreds of old tweets with missing images.
Creating communities is hard, but Google wants a unified 'Google' community, not multiple disparate ones -- just look at how they handled YouTube.
Even if you throw in some machine learning to figure out if the user's looking at memes or gifs or porn, I can't imagine the marginal value of that data being of use to Google. It's essentially unmonetizable, which is why most image hosts disappear after a few years.
Imgur was successful in avoiding that fate by pivoting to a community, but that community would be of no use to someone like Google.
A guess: (and note they kept youtube a wholly owned subsidiary I think) they desperately had to make sure the Viacom lawsuit defense was well funded and aggressively defended or it would severely damage Google's business.
Also, google has now had success building photo sites / photo products, but at the time of the youtube purchase, hadn't had much success building a video product.
Are you trying to imply that Youtube is a monopoly? Aren't there others like vimeo, etc.? Besides, there is nothing from technology perspective to make it a monopoly. All you need is a server rack and a bunch of web developers who can build such a site, right?
Well, there's also massive scaling, which the average web developer isn't experienced with. Then there's creating a consistent experience across various devices and browsers.
So, sure, anyway halfway competent developer could bang out a YouTube (or Facebook, etc) prototype in a few weeks, but going from there to a reliable, usable service at scale is something else altogether.
You're going to need some project managers, SREs, sysadmins, front and back end web developers, programmers who know about video encoding, content experts, lawyers, etc...
Youtube is a monopoly in a way Google is a monopoly. Just like how there's Bing and DuckDuckGo but most people use Google, most people use Youtube although some do use sites like vimeo. If you think it's so easy to build a site that competes with Google or Youtube you should go ahead and build one and overtake them. After all, nowadays everything is open sourced, you can even build your own search engine from scratch overnight.
Does anyone know if it was specifically the community/userbase that enticed Google, or was there some technical aspects to YouTube that Google couldn't or didn't want to build themselves?
Contemporary media coverage suggests they wanted to buy out a competitor which became the dominant video site in a year. This New York Times article [1] from 2006 wrote:
"The acquisition of the privately held YouTube will enable Google to thrive in one area of the Internet where it has so far failed to gain footing. According to Hitwise, which monitors Web traffic, [YouTube] has the lion's share of online video traffic (...) a 46 percent share, MySpace has 23 percent and Google Video has 10 percent."
Meanwhile, this 2006 article from the Economist [2] stated:
"the deal is 'an aggressive, mature move for Google, one that shows that senior management is not too proud or stubborn to see that they can't build everything themselves,' says Henry Blodget, an analyst at Cherry Hill Research. Indeed, Google's Mr Schmidt freely conceded that YouTube is the 'clear winner', especially in creating social networks around its site."
> was there some technical aspects to YouTube that Google couldn't or didn't want to build themselves?
Google had very much the power of building a YouTube-like community themselves, but buying out a competitor is a short-cut since it has the positive side-effect of removing that competition in our business. After buying YouTube, Google didn't have to waste time in building a community around a new product or "converting" the YouTube masses to theirs.
This short-cut way of acquisition is nowadays preferred by large companies rather than risk everything by doing innovation and "real" competition.
If I remember google video was superior in video quality and looser limitations, it was a place where you could commonly find full documentaries while youtube still had a 11 minute video limit. It was actually google acquiring youtube that caused youtube to loosen their limitations and go for HD. I doubt they bought it for any technical reasons, google's infrastructure was already superior.
Google knew that Youtube will turn into the largest video search engine, so they bought it strategically. Otherwise someone else could have swooped in and acquired the largest video search site, which would have left Google vulnerable in many ways.
Summary: userbase/community was what drove the network effect, which made it impossible for Google to catch up, and that's why Google made the decision to purchase Youtube.
But most of imgur's audience is not even seeing the site or is just looking at a quick picture and then going back to reddit or some other referring site.
I think you're mistaken here. As a reddit user you might think that, but there's actually a fully functional imgur community that votes on images independently from reddit and comments on them on imgur independent from reddit.
Parent said "most of", and I think that's pretty much correct regardless of how vibrant of a community Imgur has. Most traffic to imgur is via embeds or links from another discussion forums. The former case obviously provides no exposure to Imgur community, and even in the latter case most people are there only to look at the picture, not to engage as an Imgur community member.
The whole point of this discussion thread is that Imgur is f*ed because they aren't independent enough. Otherwise there's nothing to worry about, right?
Imgur is exactly as much of a commodity as YouTube. The exception is that they host images instead, and when you consider that the images are silent webm videos a lot of the time, the lines are even more blurry. The value to both communities is just that, their communities.
Agreed; whilst there are some subcommunities that appear unscathed, YouTube comments are typically a cesspool of hurtful spew from the bottom feeders of human society.
> Imgur is exactly as much of a commodity as YouTube
Youtube isn't a commodity. It's the place that even your aunt, mother, grandmother, uncle will visit and knows to visit for entertainment or music. People who would never have a reason to visit imgur.
Commodity is when your product has no differentiation on the market. Imgur does not have enough differentiation on the market and that's why they're a commodity. For image centric community you can go to Reddit, Tumblr, or any kind of online forums really. Youtube's differentiation is that it has created significant network effect around public video hosting. Can you think of any meaningful competition other than Vimeo? (Or maybe a couple of others but they're nowhere as close as all the online forums online)
Yes, Google can create a infinite scalable image hosting overnight, but creating a community is a lot harder.