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Imgur

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Imgur
Type of site
Image hosting service
Available inEnglish
Created byAlan Schaaf
URLwww.imgur.com
CommercialYes
RegistrationOptional

Imgur (pronounced /ˈɪmədʒər/ like "imager"; imager[2]) is an online image sharing community and image host founded by Alan Schaaf in 2009 in Athens, Ohio, United States.

History

Alan Schaaf, Founder and CEO of Imgur in 2014

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,[3] it took off almost instantly, jumping from a thousand hits per day to a million total page views in the first five months.[4] The website became widely recognized following its rise to popularity on social news websites such as Reddit and Digg.[5] In October 2012, Imgur expanded its functionality to allow users to directly upload images to the site instead of requiring images to gain enough attraction through other social media sites like Reddit to show up on the popular image gallery.[6]

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;[7] sponsored images and self-service ads were introduced in 2013.[8]

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.[7]

In January 2011, the company moved from Ohio to San Francisco.[9] As of June 2013 they had 10 employees,[10] and won the Best Bootstrapped Startup award at TechCrunch's 2012 Crunchies Awards.[11]

Funding

In April 2014, 5 years after it was founded, Imgur raised $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz, along with a small contribution from Reddit.[12] Besides the large investment, Andreessen Horowitz's Lars Dalgaard will join Imgur's board.[13]

Imgur previously received partial funding through "premium accounts" in which users can have an unlimited amount of uploaded images, as opposed to 125 for normal users. This has since been changed, and the website's main form of funding is through advertisements on the site.

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.[14] 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.[15] 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."[16] This was ultimately honored by the site's administrators who subsequently uploaded images which had been sent from users via the postal service.[17] 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. For 2015, they introduced the "collaborative imgur" option, in which users could decide to independently make the title, upload the image, or write a caption for a picture without seeing the others' submissions, creating random-seeming, unrelated posts. Additionally, an imgur "video game", inspired by Twitch Plays Pokémon was introduced, in which groups of users entered commands to move between images, and upvote or down vote images.

The official Imgur mascot is the Imguraffe, which was created originally as an April Fools' Day joke, but was "too cute to give up", thereafter becoming the official mascot.[18]

Popularity

As of 2013, Imgur has largely overtaken other hosts, such as Photobucket, ImageShack, and TinyPic.[19]

In its first month, Imgur saw 93,000 pageviews. According to EdgeCast, Imgur's former content delivery network (CDN), Imgur serves more images in 10 minutes than there are in the entire Library of Congress.[7] In 2012, there were 300 million images uploaded, 364 billion image views counted, and 42 petabytes of data transferred.[20]

In September 2012, Imgur sent out 3,000 free stickers based on user requests.[21]

As of August 2014 nearly 2/3 of all successful posts on Reddit were links to an image on Imgur.[22]

Features

Albums

Albums were introduced on October 11, 2010.[23] 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.[24] Gallery profiles give the user the ability to view their past public activity.[25] 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.[26]

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.[27]

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.[28] 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[29] and trophies.[30] Images from the gallery are often later posted to social news sites such as Huffington Post.[31] Random mode was released on July 30, 2012 and allows users to browse the entire history of the public gallery randomly.[32]

GIFV

See also: Video alternative to the Graphics Interchange Format

Since October 2014, Imgur automatically converts uploaded animated GIF files into WebM and MP4 video files, which are much smaller.[33]

Video to GIF

In January 2015, Imgur allowed users to link video URLs to create GIFs directly through the website.[34] This was geared towards allowing its users to create quality GIFs regardless of image editing knowledge.

Topics

In February 2015, Imgur announced "Topics" which was a quick way for users to sort and view specific images that belonged to a specific group determined by tags such as science, earth, or cats.[35]

Mobile Apps

In March and June 2015, Imgur introduced official mobile apps for iOS[36] and Android, respectively.[37]

Community

Since the site's creation, Imgur has grown along with its user community. Self-named "Imgurians" have created much content in an effort to bring the community even closer. In 2014, user "TheBritishAreComing" created a social network site named Social Savanna.[38] It's purpose was to create a space for users to connect with one another through chat rooms of specific topics and even offering a functionality to create meetups with other nearby users. Since its launch, the site has seen over 65,000 Imgurians with an average of 5,000 active members and 75,000 page views per day.[38]

In 2014, user "AnthonyCapo" submitted a series of posts that went viral and has come to be known as the "Danquan Saga".[39] Within 2 days, the gallery gained traction and was shared on other sites such as Reddit and FunnyJunk.[40] The post became so notorious that the sandwich chain, JImmy Johns, which was mentioned in the posts, responded to the posts with a series of tweets.[41] Since the initial reaction, some has speculated that it was all a hoax to promote Jimmy Johns.

In 2015, driven by its community demand, creator Alan Schaaf and the Imgur staff hosted its first ever "Camp Imgur".[42] It was created as an celebratory event to bring users of the site together on a 4-day retreat at Camp Navarro in Mendocino, California, and included hiking, stand-up comedians, and meetings with the staff of Imgur and other users.[43]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Imgur.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2015-05-25.
  2. ^ "How do you pronounce Imgur?". Imgur.com. Retrieved April 26, 2015.
  3. ^ Schaaf, Alan (February 23, 2009). "My Gift to Reddit: I created an image hosting service that doesn't suck. What do you think?". Reddit. Retrieved April 9, 2013.
  4. ^ "Interview: Imgur's Path to a Billion Image Views Per Day - Liz Gannes - Social - AllThingsD". AllThingsD.
  5. ^ Quigley, Robert (January 13, 2010). "Viral Sensation In One Year: A Q&A With Imgur Founder Alan Schaaf". Mediaite. Retrieved April 6, 2013.
  6. ^ "Imgur Expands Viral Image Sharing Platform". Press - Imgur. Retrieved 2015-12-03.
  7. ^ a b c "Imgur's Startup Journey (Infographic)". imgur.com. May 15, 2015.
  8. ^ "Tech Tuesday Takeover: Self-Serve Ads". imgur.com.
  9. ^ "Imgur's Startup Journey (Infographic)". imgur.com. May 15, 2012.
  10. ^ Ryan Broderick (July 9, 2013). "How Imgur Is Taking Over Reddit From The Inside". Buzzfeed.
  11. ^ "Imgur Wins Best Bootstrapped Startup, Sees 1 Billion Pageviews Per Month". TechCrunch. 1 February 2012.
  12. ^ Smith, Jack. "Imgur Gets $40 Million Investment From Andreessen Horowitz". BetaBeat.
  13. ^ Perez, Sarah April 3, 2014. Techcrunch. "After Five Years Of Bootstrapping, Imgur Raises $40 Million From Andreessen Horowitz & Reddit"
  14. ^ "Catify Your Images!". imgur.com.
  15. ^ "Introducing the Imguraffe!". imgur.com. March 31, 2012.
  16. ^ "Upload via Snail Mail". Imgur.com. April 1, 2013. Retrieved April 6, 2013.
  17. ^ "Uploaded via Snail Mail". Imgur.
  18. ^ "The Imguraffe". Imgur help.
  19. ^ "Google Trends".
  20. ^ "Best Images of 2012 - Imgur". Imgur.
  21. ^ "Imgur stickers the world". imgur.com.
  22. ^ Olson, Randy (11 January 2015). "A data-driven guide to creating successful reddit posts, redux". randalolson.com. Retrieved 3 January 2016.
  23. ^ "Biggest site update ever".
  24. ^ http://imgur.com/help/accounts
  25. ^ "Account Stats and Profiles".
  26. ^ "Upgrade to Imgur Pro". Imgur.
  27. ^ "The Imgur Meme Generator". Imgur.com. June 26, 2013. Retrieved July 2, 2013.
  28. ^ "Virality Scores & User Submitted Images".
  29. ^ "Reputation Revised".
  30. ^ "Imgur Trophies".
  31. ^ "Imgur".
  32. ^ "New header, random mode, upload from clipboard, oh my!".
  33. ^ "Introducing GIFV". imgur.com. October 14, 2014.
  34. ^ "Introducing Video to GIF | The Imgur Blog". Retrieved 2015-12-03.
  35. ^ "Introducing Topics | The Imgur Blog". Retrieved 2015-12-03.
  36. ^ "The New Imgur iPhone App is Here!".
  37. ^ "Imgur Brings Its Trove Of Memes And Cat GIFs To Android". Fast Company. 2 June 2015.
  38. ^ a b "1 year of connecting imgurians!". Imgur. Retrieved 2015-12-03.
  39. ^ "The Danquan Saga". Imgur. Retrieved 2015-12-03.
  40. ^ "Daquan". Know Your Meme. Retrieved 2015-12-03.
  41. ^ "Jimmy John's on Twitter". Twitter. Retrieved 2015-12-03.
  42. ^ "Announcing Camp Imgur!". Imgur. Retrieved 2015-12-03.
  43. ^ "Camp Imgur". Imgur. Retrieved 2015-12-03.
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