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by sjg007 1984 days ago
Imgur seems like an interesting case study.
2 comments

Sort of. The provided a functionality that reddit did not, so they weren't really unbundling anything. They smartly realized that reddit would probably eventually provide that same functionality (which they did) so they started down the path of building their own community before that happened.
Lucky for them, the reddit implementation is as-of-now still pretty awful.
Yeah but that's the sad part. People still use reddit's built in system because it's there, despite the inferiority.
True, it's the path of least resistance, particularly if you're a new user.
On the contrary, the sad part is that people still use imgur. Going off-site to be bombarded with off-topic pics (all imgur pics are surrounded by random other (sometimes NSFW) pics isn't a great experience.
I dunno, what really do you need to do other than have your pictures uploaded and displayed on the post?

I kinda figure that's all 90% of the userbase actually wants from the feature?

Does Imgur make money and is it profitable? As far as I know their "business model" (which actually isn't one, or at least not a profitable one) is "growth and engagement".

Their core product isn't something people want to pay for (image hosting itself can be obtained anywhere, including from cloud storage subscriptions people already pay for), and their social side is at odds with the advertising business model - you need ads to survive, but ads revenue is forever decreasing and people will leave if you put too much ads.

They were profitable for a while, and then got a round of funding from Andreessen-Horowitz. [0] I don't know if they are still profitable, but I recently for some reason was on the founder's (Alan Schaaf) wikipedia page.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Schaaf#cite_note-3