> For supporting the costs: we ended up raising $ from some awesome individuals.
Okay but that's capital, not revenue.
> We've built out a team (we're hiring! rory@gifs.com), and the team has done a lot of work to ensure that gifs/webms/mp4s are transcoded insanely fast.
A great dev team can arguably keep costs down with efficient systems but that's still not revenue. Also, dev teams cost money too so that's more expense.
> We've had over 4,5000,000 gifs made, and over billions of .gifs delivered, which has started to run up some cost
Okay sounds like some traction but I read that as about $11.5K/month of bandwidth spending[1] (just bandwidth, not counting transcoding costs).
> ...which leads us to sustainability: we look at the gifs player almost like the youtube embedded player, but for, well, short media. Maybe one day ever gif/webm will be in the gifs player. As we continue to build tools for empowering people to augment videos, we hope to see more people make cool short clips within our ecosystem.
So where's the revenue? Embedded player licensing? Intermingling ads? Changing the overlay icons for Brazzers to link straight there?
I love VC fueled fun as much as the next guy, but I'm genuinely curious what the end game is. Ride it out and hope the user base becomes worthy of an acquisition before the money burns?
[1]: 1 Billion Images x 100 KB/Image x $.12/GB[2]
[2]: Based on the IP I'm guessing they're running on GCE with rack rates for bandwidth at $.12/GB. Probably over estimating though.