Imgur is an online image hosting service founded by Alan Schaaf in 2009 in Athens, Ohio.
Imgur describes itself as "the home to the web's most popular image content, curated
in real time by a dedicated community through commenting, voting and sharing."
It offers free image hosting to millions of users a day, and a comment-based social community.
The company supports itself with revenue generated from ad sales, Pro accounts, commercial hosting
and merchandise.
On October 22, 2012, Imgur released a user-submitted gallery, which allows users to submit directly
to the Imgur gallery for public view, comments and votes.
On June 26, 2013, Imgur released its first content creation tool, the Imgur Meme Generator,
which offers simple image macro creation as well as a public gallery of popular meme templates.
The official Imgur mascot is the Imguraffe, which was created originally as an April Fools'
Day joke, but was "too cute to give up", thereby becoming the official mascot.
History The company was started in Athens, Ohio as
Alan Schaaf's side project as he attended Ohio University for computer science.
The service, which the creator describes as "an image hosting service that doesn't suck",
was created as a response to the usability problems encountered in similar services.
Originally designed as a gift to the online community of Reddit, it took off almost instantly,
jumping from a thousand hits per day to a million total page views in the first five
months.
The website became widely recognized following its rise to popularity on social news websites
such as Reddit and Digg.
In the beginning, Imgur relied on donations to help with the web hosting costs.
As the site grew, it needed additional sources of revenue to keep up with demand.
Display ads were introduced in May 2009; sponsored images and self-service ads were introduced
in 2013.
In order to scale and manage its growth, Imgur used three different hosting providers in
the first year before settling on Voxel, then switching to Amazon Web Services in late 2011.
In January 2011, the company moved from Ohio to San Francisco.
As of June 2013 they had 10 employees, and won the Best Bootstrapped Startup award at
TechCrunch's 2012 Crunchies Awards.
Funding In April 2014, 5 years after it was founded,
Imgur raised $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz, along with a small contribution from Reddit.
Besides the large investment, Andreessen Horowitz’s Lars Dalgaard will join Imgur’s board.
April Fools' Jokes Imgur has a history of playing April Fools'
Day jokes on its users.
The first documented joke in 2011 was the Catification feature, which allowed users
to automatically add cats to any image with one click.
In 2012, Imgur introduced the Imguraffe.
The "simple Imguraffe sharer" version included a giraffe print background and a giraffe with
a top hat and monocle in the logo.
In 2013, as another April Fools' Day joke, the site announced the ability to upload images
using traditional snail mail, to "appeal to a broad user base which includes film users,
the computer illiterate, and those afraid of radiation from scanners."
This was ultimately honored by the site's administrators who subsequently uploaded images
which had been sent from users via the postal service.
In 2014, as an April Fool's Day joke, Imgur introduced the viralizer, a comment generator
which automatically posted generic comments generally unrelated to the image being commented
on.
Popularity As of 2013, Imgur has largely overtaken other
hosts, such as Photobucket, ImageShack, and TinyPic.
In its first month, Imgur saw 93,000 pageviews.
According to EdgeCast, Imgur's former CDN, Imgur serves more images in 10 minutes than
there are in the entire Library of Congress.
In 2012, there were 300 million images uploaded, 364 billion image views counted, and 42 petabytes
of data transferred.
Site statistics current as of May 2014: In September 2012, Imgur sent out 3,000 free
stickers based on user requests.
Features Albums
Albums were introduced on October 11, 2010.
Album layouts are fully customizable and embeddable.
Accounts On January 9, 2010, Alan Schaaf announced
the creation of Imgur accounts, which allow users to create custom image galleries and
manage their images.
Accounts allow full image management including editing, deletion, album creation and embedding,
as well as the ability to comment on viral images and submit to the public gallery.
Gallery profiles give the user the ability to view their past public activity.
If an account has more than 225 images, only the most recently uploaded 225 are displayed
in their profile.
Paid pro accounts were created in 2010 to remove these limitations and allows infinite
image storage, as well as increased upload limits.
Meme Generator Since June 26, 2013, Imgur has provided a
"Meme Generator" service that allows users to create image macros with custom text using
a wide variety of images.
Gallery The public Imgur gallery is a collection of
the most viral images from around the web based on an algorithm that computes views,
shares and votes based on time.
As opposed to private account uploads, images added to the gallery are publicly searchable
by title.
Members of the Imgur community, self-proclaimed "Imgurians," can vote and comment on the images,
earning reputation points and trophies.
Images from the gallery are often later posted to social news sites such as Huffington Post.
Random mode was released on July 30, 2012 and allows users to browse the entire history
of the public gallery randomly.
Animals The official Imgur mascot/animal is the giraffe.
It is usually wearing a monocle, or a top hat, which represents the act of class.
On its error page, it includes cats dressed in clothing from famous men/women in history
to spice the classy subject.
Another animal featured is a penguin, which is used to designate the meme generator button.
References
External links Official website