There's always speculative value because some executive somewhere thinks they can turn it around and make it profitable. So it can keep being flipped across different owners. It can go infinitely because the cash comes from elsewhere.
it's essentially just burning through VC money to provide free image hosting. every time the funders start trying to make their money back, somebody will start a new free image host funded by a new batch of suckers.
My guess is that someone will eventually end up creating a bootstrapped lifestyle business, similar to craigslist.
Assuming they don’t encrappen it, and there’s some tangential thing they can charge a nominal fee for that rides their network effects, they’ll have a lasting business that will provide ~5-10 people with comfortable income indefinitely.
I don't remember all the details but imgur used to have some pretty strict limits. iirc you could only upload 250 images on a free account?
I was wrong. It was worse. 75 was the limit for free users. I think I never reached the limit until they upped it to 225.
> In order to get ready for upcoming features, the number of recent images a regular user can have in his/her account has been raised from 75 to 225. Keep in mind that you will still be able to upload more if you go over the limit, it’s just that the older images will be hidden from the account (not deleted!). This is great news, because now you can create even more albums and share all your images at once.
> Also, imgur pro accounts have just been made cheaper! A 1 year imgur subscription is now cheaper than any other comparable photo service, including Flickr, Photobucket and ImageShack. With imgur pro, not only is there no limit to the amount of images you can have in your account, there is absolutely no compression, and your images are not modified in any way if they are under 5MB in size.
that was only ever a restriction if you were trying to upload images to your profile and direct people to your profile to see the images you've uploaded. which isn't a thing i've ever wanted to do.
if you were just using it as a image host for sharing images on other sites, it worked perfectly fine without an account. now they've crippled that functionality because they want to make money.
Can this go in infinitely?