New Image Hosting Service Pays Thousands of Uploaders in Bitcoin
Image hosting is one of the latest applications that bitcoin has improved upon, thanks to one-month-old Supload. The service shares advertiser revenues with its users in bitcoin. Bitcoin.com reached out to Mike Reilly, Supload co-founder and website programmer. He recently announced that his site paid out “nearly 2 BTC worldwide to our users, including many first time Bitcoin users.”
Also read: Here Are Bitcoin’s 8 Fastest Growing Markets
What is Supload?
Supload is an image hosting service much like the popular website Imgur. It 
allows users to upload photos such as memes and animated gifs to their board, hosting them for free. Users are then given unique links to share or to insert their images into social media sites such as Reddit and Facebook.
The main difference is that Supload pays its users 50% of its profits generated from ads displayed on its website. There is a $1.00 minimum to withdraw. However, once earnings are finalized, bitcoins can be withdrawn at any time, according to the site.
Since payouts are typically very small, the fees charged by traditional payment services such as Paypal would make the business model unviable. Bitcoin’s ability to send mass payments with small fees is what convinced Reilly to help create the site. He told Bitcoin.com:
We believe Bitcoin gives us the ability to finally pay content creators for the traffic that they generate by instantly sending smaller amounts of money all over the world with minimal fees.
New Users Introduced to Bitcoin
In the one month of operation, the service is off to a strong start. “The user base is around 2000 users since we launched a few weeks ago on Reddit,” Reilly said, adding that 
“around 70% of the users are active.”
While the site grows both in users and new functionality, Supload’s marketing has so far been posting in social media communities that use a lot of images such as Reddit. This tactic has helped them find new users for both their service as well as for bitcoin.
Reddit user “ttwtf12” said “Amazing site, this is what got me into Bitcoin” after the payout announcement. “Always been confused as to how Bitcoin works and been hesitant to step in, but this site enables you to earn some bitcoin first and then see how it goes,” he added.
Competitions
Even when directly paying users to use their free service, the competition from other image hosts is formidable. Imgur is the biggest website that hosts images online. Website statistic service Quantcast estimates that Imgur currently has 79.7 million unique visitors per month and 2.6 billion page views, ranking it around the 50th most popular website in 
the world.
It remains to be seen how many of those tens of millions of people will prefer doing what they do in exchange for bitcoin over at Supload instead. At the very least, some of them will be introduced to bitcoin. And who knows, Imgur may start using the cryptocurrency to share their revenue with users too.
Supload’s Future Plans
Reilly and his partner created the service to help bitcoin grow. “The future for the site is going to be focused on that same goal,” Reilly explained. “We started out with the goal of making Bitcoin easier to obtain for users all over the world by doing things on the Internet that they are probably already doing,” he revealed.
He is also planning various upgrades on the site, including more earning-focused features. “There will also be a social aspect to the site that will reward users satoshis for completing activities,” he said. As soon as they are ready, the duo has big plans for the service to compete in some other huge markets as well. Reilly noted:
As we stand now, we are only doing image monetization but we are going to focus on broader content monetization such as, files, documents, videos, and a few other options in the coming months.
Do you think Supload will take off? Let us know in the comments section below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Supload
Bitcoin.com is ramping up our tools section with a variety of useful Bitcoin-related applications. There’s a price converter, paper wallet generator, a faucet, and a verifier to validate messages using the Bitcoin blockchain. We’re pretty excited to introduce these new widgets and tools so our visitors have the best resources to navigate the Bitcoin landscape.
