<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>shalmanese</author><text>What really killed them was the GIF explosion. Average image size remains largely static and bandwidth and storage costs steadily decline so if you get your timing exactly right, you can hit that sweet spot where your CPM declines slower than your hosting costs and provide an increasingly profitable business.&lt;p&gt;However, GIFs completely upended that calculation by increasing the average file size by an order of magnitude and pushed the viability of a cruft free image host further down the road by another few years.&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I&amp;#x27;m surprised Google never just bought imgur and absorbed it under youtube or something. Being the default place on the web to host images seems like something way more strategically valuable to Google than any standalone image host.</text><parent_chain><item><author>dmerrick</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s really unfortunate that Imgur took such a turn for the worse.&lt;p&gt;Originally it seemed like Imgur was a benevolent gift to Reddit users... a clean, simple, easy to use image hosting service that everyone could use for free. I guess it was too good to be true, because now it&amp;#x27;s tricky to link to a direct image (though not impossible), and the standard landing page is filled with unnecessary clutter.&lt;p&gt;As an aside: if you&amp;#x27;re looking for an amusing read, the &amp;quot;IgnorantImgur&amp;quot; subreddit[0] is filled with examples of people from the Imgur community who seem to be oblivious to Imgur&amp;#x27;s origin as an image hosting site for Reddit users.&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.reddit.com&amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;IgnorantImgur&amp;#x2F;top&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.reddit.com&amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;IgnorantImgur&amp;#x2F;top&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Image Hosting on Reddit</title><url>https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4p5dm9/image_hosting_on_reddit/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>cortesoft</author><text>Imgur started off as a benevolent gift to Reddit users, but then as more and more people started to use it, the expenses became too great to keep it the way it was. There is no money in serving images directly with no advertising, but there is certainly costs. What were they supposed to do?</text><parent_chain><item><author>dmerrick</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s really unfortunate that Imgur took such a turn for the worse.&lt;p&gt;Originally it seemed like Imgur was a benevolent gift to Reddit users... a clean, simple, easy to use image hosting service that everyone could use for free. I guess it was too good to be true, because now it&amp;#x27;s tricky to link to a direct image (though not impossible), and the standard landing page is filled with unnecessary clutter.&lt;p&gt;As an aside: if you&amp;#x27;re looking for an amusing read, the &amp;quot;IgnorantImgur&amp;quot; subreddit[0] is filled with examples of people from the Imgur community who seem to be oblivious to Imgur&amp;#x27;s origin as an image hosting site for Reddit users.&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.reddit.com&amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;IgnorantImgur&amp;#x2F;top&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.reddit.com&amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;IgnorantImgur&amp;#x2F;top&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Image Hosting on Reddit</title><url>https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4p5dm9/image_hosting_on_reddit/</url></story>