[dylanwenzlau]

Hi. I run imgflip.com, a fine purveyor of cat pictures, among others. It serves ~100TB of bandwidth and hundreds of millions of image views per month with total infrastructure cost below 5k per month. I believe Imgflip completely avoids dark patterns because I abhor them and strive to provide positive value to humanity, although I would love for you to share your opinions to the contrary. Imgflip is also 80% profit. It employs several of the techniques you mention, but efficiently, rather than bloated and inefficient like many companies. Curious to hear your take

[novok]

So I turned off adblock, but I see no ads, even though you have some ad domains. Is imgflip pro the way you make money only? I tried again and all I saw is one banner ad, sometimes. Do you have more ads more frequently, or is it just a relatively minimal amount in general? What is the revenue split between pro & ads? For linus for example, it's about %26 youtube ads, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zt57TWkTF4

How do you deal with moderation? Is it automated, I see you even have comments? Or is it just report buttons and your takedown form? How is the support load?

What is your tech stack? PHP? Python? C#? Java? Golang?

[DaiPlusPlus]

What’s the business-model for image-hosting like thesedays?

Years ago everyone had to use an image-host (Photobucket, lol…) because all those phpBB instances on shared hosting accounts didn’t support direct image uploads or greatly limited attachments and most people didn’t have their own web hosting account to use instead.

With the rise of Web 2.0, it became important for sites to control their content - I remember the days of hotlinked images being swapped-out with obscene or vomit-inducing content as an act of revenge on bandwidth leeches - and cheap storage meant it wasn’t a problem to host hundreds of gigabytes of content by oneself. Can you image if Facebook and Instagram didn’t host the images posted to them?

It’s 2021 now, web-forums are dead - if people want to share photos to a small circle they’ll likely use Dropbox or OneDrive - or just copy+paste between Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp…

Do guide question: who uses your service and where’s the opportunity for profit? Serving images directly means people can’t see any ads, and browsers now block more and more third-party cookies (until all of them by 2023, I understand) so using image-hosting as a way to track users across the web is gone - is your frontpage traffic enough? Savvy users who use image hosts also tend to the ones to adblock too, even on mobile.

[nine_k]

Thank you for the reality check!

So, well, my estimate of a few grand a month was not completely off.

[tpetry]

It would be really interesting reading an article on what you do different on what each part costs. Effectively how image hosting services work nowadays or if nothing changed in the past 15 years.