Comment by new_account_5009 on 21/06/2016 at 16:14 UTC

193 upvotes, 11 direct replies (showing 11)

View submission: Image Hosting on Reddit

Seems like this will be pretty costly to maintain. With big increases to expenses, what's Reddit's plan to increase revenue correspondingly?

Replies

Comment by Drunken_Economist at 21/06/2016 at 16:26 UTC

314 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Wait I thought we agreed that *you* were gonna cover the hosting costs. Oh man this is awkward

Comment by Golden-Death at 21/06/2016 at 16:19 UTC

44 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Affiliate links is one plan.

Comment by therico at 21/06/2016 at 16:43 UTC

20 upvotes, 2 direct replies

imgur's bandwidth costs must be 100x reddit's, how do they stay afloat?

Comment by ruizscar at 21/06/2016 at 18:06 UTC

14 upvotes, 1 direct replies

No official response = you wouldn't like the response

Comment by wkoorts at 21/06/2016 at 18:37 UTC

1 upvotes, 1 direct replies

They're anticipating the feature will pay for itself. There's just no way any business would lay out that kind of cash without expecting a return on investment.

With any online app like Reddit, the number one goal is to drive traffic up. Very simply, that leads to more ad revenue. That means when a new feature is introduced it should in some way cause that to happen. If we look at image hosting, that could happen in a few ways:

• At face value, making it easier to use Reddit by introducing image uploads means people will be more likely to submit content. More content means more reasons to keep coming back to Reddit.

• A more subtle effect could be that they feel they've lost too many users to imgur. With imgur having its own app nowadays with commenting, voting etc. I'd be willing to bet Reddit feels concerned that people are going directly there and bypassing Reddit entirely. Anecdotally, I have a friend who has done exactly this since a few months ago.

Comment by nathannapalm at 21/06/2016 at 17:08 UTC

3 upvotes, 2 direct replies

Also, i'm wondering how will this affect imgurs revenue?

Comment by mrbooze at 22/06/2016 at 00:44 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

S3 is a lot cheaper than you might think, especially if they consider this low-importance enough to only pay for a reduced-redundancy bucket (or whatever the current AWS equivalent is).

I'm sure it will still be a decent chunk of money at reddit scale, but probably a very tiny fraction of their overall hosting costs.

Comment by WhatredditorsLack at 21/06/2016 at 19:38 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

With big increases to expenses, what's Reddit's plan to increase revenue correspondingly?

Bigger issue is that imgur is basically a competitor to reddit at this point, and they want to stop driving traffic to a competitor.

Comment by snakespm at 21/06/2016 at 17:07 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Also with the amount of reposts reddit has, I wouldn't be surprised if they only store an individual picture once, and then just have multiple links to the same image.

Comment by freeall at 21/06/2016 at 16:22 UTC

1 upvotes, 2 direct replies

Sure there's cost involved, but as long as you don't do video it won't be an extreme cost.

Comment by dace55 at 21/06/2016 at 16:56 UTC

0 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Is this what's it like to be in upper management?