I don't know much about Reddit. From the little I've read about it, I'm curious about what prompted this policy change. As the article notes, 2015 was a difficult year for Reddit in terms of creating content policies. With images added, that makes more policing issues as the article notes here. What's the advantage to hosting its own images?With the addition of images, Reddit will have to do a lot more work to enforce its content policy. Before, it could always claim that offensive images like nude photos of celebrity Jennifer Lawrence that were distributed through its site were hosted elsewhere. Now, if it doesn’t police the uploads, more of the disgust and anger could fall on Reddit.
They collect more and more data on what you look at, what you upvote and what you interact with. That data makes you more valuable for targeted advertising. So instead of hammering thousands of page-views worth of ads at the whole site, they can target ads at the people most likely to click on the link. So, for example, people in the twoxchomosone subreddit will be assumed female and shown ads related to women. If that same user then goes to a makeup sub, they get cosmetics ads. If that person then hangs out in the overwatch sub and starts to interact, then they know that this person is also a gamer and can be shown computer parts. Go into a 'local' sub and now a local business can say "Show my ad to women who are in my city and play games" and pay a bit more for the ads that are shown. If that same user goes to a sub that focuses on food, then they will get restaurants or maybe amazon ads for cookware. the more data they have on this user, the more detailed the ad buy can be and the more reddit can charge for the targeted exposure. This move also works toward a more complete audience capture. Keep your audience on your site as much as possible. If they are going to Imgur to post pictures to link to reddit, that time on Imgur is not spent looking at ads and interacting with reddit's ad network. The ads might be the same based on the link in the threads, but with more information on the user base, the better they get at targeting.
Thank you for the explanation. That makes sense. The more facetime with the site allows for more exposure to ads. I didn't think of it like that before. If people go to imgur, they might spend more time there instead.This move also works toward a more complete audience capture. Keep your audience on your site as much as possible. If they are going to Imgur to post pictures to link to reddit, that time on Imgur is not spent looking at ads and interacting with reddit's ad network.