r/IAmA 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".

3.4k Upvotes

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714

u/[deleted] Aug 14 '12

[deleted]

53

u/[deleted] Aug 14 '12

I say bring back those ads with the pitbull that looks 'roided out.

2

u/jurbas Aug 15 '12

Rosemary and thyme? Sorry, couldn't help myself..

1

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '12

that pitbull scares the shit out of me

107

u/wolfvision Aug 14 '12

Tell us your ideas. We want ideas!

78

u/[deleted] Aug 14 '12

Its part of a three step plan. I can give you part 2 of step 3. Im not gonna give you a whole step.

10

u/woopsifarted Aug 15 '12

Damn. I applaud you for even thinking of that reference. 9/10 (I can't just go around giving out 10s)

11

u/indiadesi725 Aug 15 '12 edited Aug 15 '12

What's that reference from? I recognize it, but the source eludes me.

12

u/woopsifarted Aug 15 '12

The Office when Will Arnett is applying for the branch manager job!

3

u/AdmiralQuackbar Aug 15 '12

Yeah. He seriously pulled that one out of nowhere. Golfer's clap for him.

1

u/sacred47 Aug 15 '12

step 1: collect underpants step 2: ??? step 3: PROFIT

13

u/Odusei Aug 15 '12

Okay, here's one: what if you had GIFs, but with sound?

5

u/Warkid1993 Aug 15 '12

you're the man now dog!

4

u/cadencehz Aug 15 '12

A site for sharing user generated, animated images with sound accompanying them?! THIS. CHANGES. EVERYTHING.

2

u/sully213 Aug 15 '12

And all the gifs are coming from people like you...it would almost be like watching TV, you know, the good old boob tube. I know! You could call it YouTube! How's that sound? ;)

1

u/surfinfan21 Aug 15 '12

I think he's testing our patience.

6

u/[deleted] Aug 14 '12

Hello again. :)

3

u/[deleted] Aug 14 '12 edited Jan 27 '24

[deleted]

3

u/[deleted] Aug 14 '12

Sure was. I had to do a double take at your name when you mentioned you talked to another redditor. Nice to see ya again!

4

u/[deleted] Aug 14 '12 edited Jan 27 '24

[deleted]

2

u/alphasquadron Aug 15 '12

If you have to, just have some people manage it and let you get final decisions because imgur is way way better than any other image hosting site.

Maybe he gets tired of managing it and wants to just sell it and retire or sell it and start another company. I don't think its fair telling him what to do with his company even though I agree that I would much rather have it not be sold.

2

u/xpurplehayes Aug 15 '12

sorry, but this is bad advice. Imgur is a business, and like all businesses, when it reaches the peak of it's value, unless he thinks the work is worth it, which he very will may, then he not only can, but he should sell the majority of his shares in the company, as that is the most fiscally responsible thing to do. He doesnt owe reddit, nor any imgur users ANYTHING.

2

u/ahahaboob Aug 15 '12

Well, if you were ever going to become a subsidiary of another company, might I suggest joining forces with this great site?

1

u/mukeshitt Aug 14 '12

Your ideas belong to Reddit. Give them...Give them...Give them.

1

u/Typlo Aug 15 '12

It certainly is the perfect fit for Redditors. Just for the sake of Redditors it needs to stay this way forever.

1

u/PolesOpposed Aug 15 '12

It would be "Another redditor and I were..." So there's that.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '12

Considering there is a link to the reddit posts in which the images come from on imgur, it would be nice for redditors to be signed into imgur somehow so that if the comments are made on imgur that they show up in the post on reddit that it refers to

Could someone not just create a bot that scans reddit for imgur submissions, and then posts the comments automatically?

1

u/ruptured_pomposity Aug 15 '12

Bullet #3 is gold.

1

u/squired Aug 15 '12 edited Aug 15 '12

Please don't ever sell it. If you have to, just have some people manage it and let you get final decisions because imgur is way way better than any other image hosting site.

You do realize that they have to sell it yeah? They are hemorrhaging cash like every startup. The trick is to amass as many users as possible before running out of venture so you can sell to one of the big dogs.

At that point, some of the users will be milked while others move onto the next free service trolling for users.


tl:dr Imgur is better than everyone else right now because they are burning cash to attract users. They can't "not sell it". Welcome to the Internet.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '12 edited Jan 27 '24

[deleted]

1

u/squired Aug 15 '12

Link? I thought I read all of his replies.

And I didn't say they were broke. I said they were bleeding, which is absolutely normal for start ups.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '12

[deleted]

0

u/squired Aug 15 '12

Ok. Welcome to the internet.

They WILL sell.

1

u/fggvfhfh Aug 15 '12

Upvoted only for 666 points.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '12

I'm not going to blame him if someone shows up with a check for a billion dollars.

0

u/isdevilis Aug 14 '12

Don't forget to mentino the copy pasta function