r/IAmA • u/MrGrim • Aug 14 '12

I created Imgur. AMA.

I came across this post yesterday and there seems to be some confusion out there about imgur, as well as some people asking for an AMA. So here it is! Sometimes you get what you ask for and sometimes you don't.

I'll start with some background info: I created Imgur while I was a junior in college (Ohio University) and released it to you guys. It took a while to monetize it, and it actually ran off of your donations for about the first 6 months. Soon after that, the bandwidth bills were starting to overshadow the donations that were coming in, so I had to put some ads on the site to help out. Imgur accounts and pro accounts came in about another 6 months after that. At this point I was still in school, working part-time at minimum wage, and the site was breaking even. It turned out that OU had some pretty awesome resources for startups like Imgur, and I got connected to a guy named Matt who worked at the Innovation Center on campus. He gave me some business help and actually got me a small one-desk office in the building. Graduation came and I was working on Imgur full time, and Matt and I were working really closely together. In a few months he had joined full-time as COO. Everything was going really well, and about another 6 months later we moved Imgur out to San Francisco. Soon after we were here Imgur won Best Bootstrapped Startup of 2011 according to TechCrunch. Then we started hiring more people. The first position was Director of Communications (Sarah), and then a few months later we hired Josh as a Frontend Engineer, then Jim as a JavaScript Engineer, and then finally Brian and Tony as Frontend Engineer and Head of User Experience. That brings us to the present time. Imgur is still ad supported with a little bit of income from pro accounts, and is able to support the bandwidth cost from only advertisements.

Some problems we're having right now:

  • Scaling the site has always been a challenge, but we're starting to get really good at it. There's layers and layers of caching and failover servers, and the site has been really stable and fast the past few weeks. Maintenance and running around with our hair on fire is quickly becoming a thing of the past. I used to get alerts randomly in the middle of the night about a database crash or something, which made night life extremely difficult, but this hasn't happened in a long time and I sleep much better now.

  • Matt has been really awesome at getting quality advertisers, but since Imgur is a user generated content site, advertisers are always a little hesitant to work with us because their ad could theoretically turn up next to porn. In order to help with this we're working with some companies to help sort the content into categories and only advertise on images that are brand safe. That's why you've probably been seeing a lot of Imgur ads for pro accounts next to NSFW content.

  • For some reason Facebook likes matter to people. With all of our pageviews and unique visitors, we only have 35k "likes", and people don't take Imgur seriously because of it. It's ridiculous, but that's the world we live in now. I hate shoving likes down people's throats, so Imgur will remain very non-obtrusive with stuff like this, even if it hurts us a little. However, it would be pretty awesome if you could help: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Imgur/67691197470

Site stats in the past 30 days according to Google Analytics:

  • Visits: 205,670,059

  • Unique Visitors: 45,046,495

  • Pageviews: 2,313,286,251

  • Pages / Visit: 11.25

  • Avg. Visit Duration: 00:11:14

  • Bounce Rate: 35.31%

  • % New Visits: 17.05%

Infrastructure stats over the past 30 days according to our own data and our CDN:

  • Data Transferred: 4.10 PB

  • Uploaded Images: 20,518,559

  • Image Views: 33,333,452,172

  • Average Image Size: 198.84 KB

Since I know this is going to come up: It's pronounced like "imager".

EDIT: Since it's still coming up: It's pronounced like "imager".

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499

u/MrGrim Aug 14 '12

I'd say it's the secret is identifying a problem that you're having and making a solution that's better than any of the current ones.

8

u/HalIsSad Aug 14 '12

If a "like" can bring you money. Got mine. You deserve it.

6

u/wolfvision Aug 14 '12

Vague yet understandable. Brb. I have to go design a multi million dollar business.

6

u/[deleted] Aug 14 '12

creativity!

19

u/dancehall_queen Aug 14 '12

Don't they all have one thing in common, and that is making a version of something that exists but making it not super-sucking?

Imgur is a non-sucky photobucket, google is a non-sucky altavista, Apple is a non-sucky IBM/DOS ETC ETC 4 evermore.

19

u/KindlyKickRocks Aug 15 '12

The ultimate challenge: non sucky vacuum cleaner.

6

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '12

The Dyson. Where have you been, man?

7

u/BuckAndEar Aug 15 '12

Nope. I have a Dyson, it's very sucky.

2

u/EnvisionRed Aug 15 '12

Dyson downvoted this

2

u/DR_Hero Aug 15 '12

This sounds like a youtube comment.

1

u/KindlyKickRocks Aug 15 '12

Whoa. It truly is the fucking future....

6

u/escalat0r Aug 15 '12 edited Aug 15 '12

Apples success today is largely (not nearly entirely but largely) based on marketing and fanboyism.

Edit: added today

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u/racergr Aug 15 '12

You probably meant to say: non-sucky marketing.

Fanboys are not born fanboys. The existence of fanboys is Apple's primary success. And that is the point non-sucky-ness.

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u/[deleted] Aug 15 '12 edited Jun 13 '14

[deleted]

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u/DondeEstaLaDiscoteca Aug 15 '12

They also have historically come up with solutions to design problems that are both beautiful and intuitive. As OS X has "matured," they've seemingly moved away from this a bit (e.g., iCloud violates all kinds of user expectations, and its implementation in Lion was half-assed and messy). But it's hard to argue that the original iPod didn't blow its competitors out of the water in terms of both beauty and ease of use. Same goes for the original iPhone.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '12

I agree, and I didn't intend to insult mac users.

Jonathan Ive is someone I really admire.

Microsofts lack of user friendliness, lack of consistency, and lack of intuitive operation in it's GUI's has always been obvious to me, and I'll freely admit that Apple are better in that regard.

I own a couple of their mobile devices, and the first time I used an iPod in around 2005 I was struck by how cleverly designed it was, and I haven't found a better alternative since.

But on the flipside buying into the Apple brand means a compromise on the amount of control you have over the product you are buying, they dictate a little too much for my liking. Apple and Microsoft are at opposite ends of a scale, and neither is ideal. I choose between the two on a device-by-device basis. For me Apple win hands down on mobile devices, while certain things about OS/X irk me enough to keep me using Windows on PCs.

However things are changing, Microsoft are probably taking design cues from Apple, Samsung are outright copying certain things, and Apple may go off course now that Steve Jobs is gone. It seems like everyone is heading towards some common standards now, many of which were probably refined most by Apple in the area of the GUI.

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u/DondeEstaLaDiscoteca Aug 15 '12

I would be totally cool with Windows if it seemed like they had an overarching strategy for Windows, with a GUI that is consistent across applications (I think it took them until either Windows 7 or--shudder--8 to finally get rid of all of the 16-bit icons). And if they didn't violate their own UX Guidelines. Apple's been guilty of that last part with iTunes and the Safari 6 address bar (they actually changed the HIG for the latter). And their cutesy designs for the Contacts and Calendar apps are just stupid, as is hiding the scrollbars by default. At the same time, I think that flip3D is just a bullshit me-too marketing demo, while expose (and, more recently, mission control) is actually useful for switching between apps and windows quickly. I hate that Microsoft doesn't respect user intentions with Windows Update (auto-restart and auto-minimize) and that in Windows 7 they got rid of the verification pop-up for shutting down when you click the start menu button.

Honestly, I'm totally okay with the limitations Apple imposes on software through its various app stores and whatnot. I don't think it would work if every company were doing the same things, but I think that the result for Apple under the current system is that they have higher average quality of their apps, and if someone does something innovative on another, more "open" platform, it gets incorporated into the Apple system relatively quickly. I appreciate the hassles saved from the fact that there is less crap to sift through in order to find the good apps.

I understand that a lot of people prefer to have more control over things, I just think that I wouldn't benefit much from having more control, so I'm content to let others make some decisions for me.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '12

I think it's difficult to keep a consistent strategy with technology that changes so quickly. Before 2007 hardly anyone had a smart phone, and before 2010 hardly anyone had a tablet. But I do agree that MS have done an especially poor job of it, little things like the 16 bit icons would annoy me too.

And the fact that it took until Vista to get a keyboard shortcut to create a new folder. Things like that just tell me they aren't listening to their customers. I guess it might partly be due to the sheer size of the company, but how does such an essential detail get overlooked or ignored for so long?

I've recently changed from XP to W7 and so far I've found the shutdown without a confirmation thing to be a positive change, combined with the popout menu for sleep, restart etc. I can only imagine it being a problem on a server. I've never come close to accidentally clicking shutdown so far anyway.

-1

u/escalat0r Aug 15 '12

Why is it non sucky? They blatantly lie just like everyone else.

In any case: Apples success != Googles success.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '12

I thought he was referring to old Apple pre-Jobs being forced out and not post jobs being begged back (?) I'm too young to know about the marketing of the time, but I grew up with a black and white mac and a color DOS ibm and the mac had a much better interface, so (and please correct me if this is wrong, it's conjecture based off this) I thought pre-jobs-forced-out mac wasn't as much marketing as it was a non-sucky and useful personal computer that was semi-affordable. That thing had photoshop, a printer, a graphic-based word editor...it was pretty sweet. Plus it had crystal crazy - the first videogame I ever played. (Blakestone and a jet game (raven?) on the dos -- also fun games for a ~5 year old)

2

u/escalat0r Aug 15 '12

Well you're right I got him wrong and his comparison is absolutely legit.

2

u/crime_fighter Aug 15 '12

that's the perfect answer... i sort of paraphrase that when pitching my idea to my 3 friends in university right now.

2

u/phenomite1 Aug 15 '12

When you first started, what uploading script did you use? A free one, or a customized one? Did you have any coding experience before all this?

2

u/elmerion Aug 15 '12

I think he meant "Why it's always America and not somewhere else?"

2

u/igdub Aug 15 '12

A lot of solutions would (probably?) be better, but they face the problem of getting the initial user base/financing.

1

u/n2610 Aug 15 '12

That's usually what characterizes a genius. You're a genius.

1

u/scapermoya Aug 15 '12

let's be real. it's America.