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How much could imgur earn with their hits/day

by ahojvole
11 replies
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Hi,

if you check the stats of imgur you see that each day it has about 1 000 000 000 hits / 1 billion image views.

How much could imgur earn fro that. Is the conversion of hits something similar to 1000 hits = $1 ?

If so. Does it mean that if imgur had a basic AdWords panel present with each image it would be earning 1 million dollars per day?
That does not make much sense does it?

What do you think?
  • Profile picture of the author J50
    Image views (hits) are not worth anything, people need to access the imgur website for there to be any profiting. Well, they make money two ways, through premium accounts and advertising. It's hard to guesstimate how much the company earns, but it does have a lot of overheads too, such as an office, staff and general running costs. But I'd estimate it makes at least a million dollars a year minimum.
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  • Profile picture of the author ahojvole
    I was asking how much could the company of IMGUR earn (hypothetically) with their billion hits per day. I dont think you as a user can earn anything.
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  • Profile picture of the author Lloyd Buchinski
    There are a couple of things working against them making money. A large percentage of their hits are just images, with no page, background, or place to put ads.

    And quite a lot of the images are a huge file size. Their bandwidth costs must be higher than almost anything but youtube.
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    • Profile picture of the author ahojvole
      Originally Posted by Lloyd Buchinski View Post

      There are a couple of things working against them making money. A large percentage of their hits are just images, with no page, background, or place to put ads.

      And quite a lot of the images are a huge file size. Their bandwidth costs must be higher than almost anything but youtube.
      Really? What is their motivation to do such service then. They have to have something out of it... It is true that the bandwidth is enormous
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  • Profile picture of the author Lloyd Buchinski
    Well they do have pages with ads too. Here is an example of one, has a Lenovo ad for me, not sure what you see.

    So rude... - Imgur

    And just below the ad, there is a notice 'pro users don't see ads.' I'm sure plenty of people are willing to pay for upgrades like that, so that's another source of income.

    That type of page lets the user post a title over the photo, in this case 'so rude...' If you middle click on the image, you get the type of page I mentioned, with no ads, like this. http://i.imgur.com/D0kkQ.jpg

    I've only seen imgur from reddit postings. Redditors tend to use both types of pages, the ones with the titles and the ones without. The ones without must be a drain, but at least they are a link back, like from this post, and from reddit, where I was looking for an example for this post. So even without an ad, they still might help the site.

    Anyway, I hope they are making money. Would hate to think that much traffic is futile.
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  • Profile picture of the author ahojvole
    Well lets say hypothetically if every single viewing of an imgur image was bound to say an adsense ad.

    Would it mean that 1billion image views would be rewarded by 1 million dollars per day.
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    • Profile picture of the author jtchaschowy
      Originally Posted by ahojvole View Post

      Well lets say hypothetically if every single viewing of an imgur image was bound to say an adsense ad.

      Would it mean that 1billion image views would be rewarded by 1 million dollars per day.
      That conversion rate is way too high. A huge majority of their recorded image views will be not their pages but in other forums and websites.

      They are making good money I'm sure but nothing like 1m per day. Their success is mostly due to their ability to be creative with their service. They integrated with reddit very intelligently. They have comments on their images, and discussions actually take place over there on the very popular images. There are "top images today", etc etc.

      That is what has made them the top dog in their field. However, targetted ads based on image content is quite hard, on these pages there is not a lot of content as there would be on say a page featuring an article. So there's no way to really target the audience viewing the particular image. The conversion rate will suffer hugely because of this.
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      • Profile picture of the author ahojvole
        Originally Posted by jtchaschowy View Post

        That conversion rate is way too high.
        Well is it? If I understand it correctly the conversion rate is usually $1 per 1000 views. Indeed you are right that majority of image views are not bound with any ads however if they were IMGUR would possibly be making a di*kload of money each day.
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  • Profile picture of the author BloggingPro
    Imgur does display advertising on their pages. In fact I don't think they are using Adsense, but rather using a high paying CPM network to serve their ads.

    Some of those networks are paying upwards of $4 to $6 per CPM, so they are easily making some big cash through those ads alone.

    Then you factor in their PRO membership fees (which eliminates advertising) and with the popularity of that site there is no way that have a crappy conversion ratio.

    https://imgur.com/register/upgrade

    Just 1000 people paying the $2.95 a month for the PRO membership would be 2950, and there are probably more than that ponying up the dough. Then you have those who paid for the yearly membership, plus all of the advertising served to those who are non-members.

    I'm sure they more than cover their hosting costs.

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  • Profile picture of the author munaworks
    Remember... Bandwidth gets cheaper by the day, their monthly membership fees don't.
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  • Profile picture of the author John Atkins
    Websites like imgur are difficult to monetize. I know this because
    I had an image hosting website, and while it didn't get as much
    traffic as imgur, it was good traffic nonetheless. Still I barely made
    money with it. Where did you get the stats from anyway?
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