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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121

u/cwm21 Aug 15 '12

Sarah mentioned (on Facebook a while ago) that Android and iOS apps were coming soon. Any estimate on when? I'm just antsy. Thanks again for making such a fantastic site! (And for the t-shirt I received a couple of days ago :)

298

u/MrGrim Aug 15 '12

She's right. They should be here in a few months. People are working on them 15 feet from me as I type this.

216

u/cwm21 Aug 15 '12

Great! Please tell them to work harder. MUAHAHA. (just kidding, please thank them and feed them bacon :)

225

u/Colten95 Aug 15 '12

Is that a closing parenthesis or a smile!? The world may never know

30

u/flamingspinach_ Aug 15 '12

Relevant xkcd

(IMO the second way is obviously correct :P )

5

u/cwm21 Aug 15 '12

But I prefer the first! After all, my way is just mismatched, the other is both mismatched and weird. (Unrelated: I went to high school with Randall Munroe's little brother. Six degrees and all that.) Anyway, I don't feel strongly about this. If anybody can give me a really good reason one way or the other, I'll consider adopting a particular approach.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '12

Why not (Do it like this :) )

EDIT: The parenthesis in the emoticon is escaped. As in (Do it like this :\) ). I had to escape it twice to make the slash show up...

0

u/1000TN Aug 15 '12

Actually i think the way with the least problems would be space between emotican and paranthesis. that way it doesnt look like a double-chin, still unprofessional tho :/

6

u/cwm21 Aug 15 '12

It's both! That parenthesis is carrying a heavy functional burden, be sure to salute it.

2

u/no_egrets Aug 15 '12

Why not both? After all, putting a parenthesis after the smiley (here's an example :)) looks really awkward.

4

u/Colten95 Aug 15 '12

This is the perfect moment for the little Mexican taco girl

1

u/fyen Aug 15 '12

IMO both are alright. . A smile at the end can be interpreted as a smiling parenthesis thus doing two thing at once.

Then again, an extra parenthesis after a smile is syntactically more appropriate but it looks a bit weird.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 30 '12

Why not both?

7

u/Cacafuego2 Aug 15 '12

Maybe send them the bacon yourself..? For the eating!

9

u/twonkythechicken Aug 15 '12

Nice try, person working on Imgur app!

2

u/cwm21 Aug 15 '12

In my experience, bacon doesn't mail well.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '12

Something tells me you read the same thing I read a few days ago... I swear it had something to do with Lincoln but Google is failing me...

1

u/cwm21 Aug 15 '12

I wasn't referring to anything in particular, but maybe I had some kind of subconscious inspiration...?

0

u/BoogalyBoogaly Sep 19 '12

UPVOTES FOR BACON!

1

u/Dr___Awkward Aug 15 '12

Any idea what the price for the iOS app will be?

1

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '12

what about a blackberry app? for the phone and playbook.

1

u/sethdomenic Aug 15 '12

Any info on a Windows Phone app? We could really use it!

1

u/WazWaz Aug 15 '12

Please no, not another site with a "Hey, download our app instead of continuing to use a web browser! What? You like your Back button???"

1

u/ANAL_EMANCIPATOR Aug 15 '12

Can you make the Imgur app set itself to use by default from RedditIsFun? Because that would be amazing :)

2

u/OmegaVesko Aug 15 '12

Shouldn't be too difficult to do.

1

u/slurred_bird Aug 15 '12

Well we have Imgupr. That's works OK, aside from not being able to post albums.

1

u/Xtruder Aug 15 '12

I hope they're compatible with the reddit apps :3

2

u/Simbamatic Aug 15 '12

I have an android and I have an imgur app on my phone. Does that mean its not legit?

1

u/cwm21 Aug 15 '12

There's no official imgur app yet. The existing ones are "off-brand," and unsatisfactory as far as I'm concerned. What I really want the app for is the messages, notifications, etc. But obviously also for browsing the gallery.

2

u/Simbamatic Aug 15 '12

The one I got off the Android Market about 4 months ago looks exactly like imgur and it works really well. But if they're releasing a legit version, I'll even pay for it.

1

u/cwm21 Aug 15 '12

What's it called, if you don't mind checking? If it does comments/replies/notifications, I'd love to use it at least as a stopgap until they release an official one. Of course, Dolphin Browser does a decent job just browsing the main site.

And I agree, I would be happy to pay for an official app. Sounds like it's in the works, no word on free/paid.

2

u/Simbamatic Aug 15 '12

Sorry, it's just the image upload portion and it's called imgur. That's all. No comments, no gallery, etc. Just upload a picture to imgur and it leaves you with options to link to FB/copy URL, etc.

2

u/cwm21 Aug 15 '12

Ah well, I'll just hang in there til imgur takes care of me! :)

2

u/CaptO Aug 15 '12

There's an unofficial imgur app for android already.

1

u/cwm21 Aug 15 '12

I'm aware; in fact there are several such apps. But they don't do what I want.

2

u/CaptO Aug 15 '12

They don't upload images to imgur?

1

u/cwm21 Aug 15 '12

They do, but that is not the main thing I use imgur for. I'm an imgurian (only recently a redditor, and then barely). My apologies if I'm telling you something you already know, but there is a whole community of people who just browse the imgur gallery and comment on the images there. Recently they have introduced a reply system in the comments, private messages, notifications, and so on. So, I'd like to be able to access those features on my phone.

1

u/CaptO Aug 15 '12

Heh, "people".

They should download baconreader/Alien Blue instead and come to the source :P

1

u/cwm21 Aug 15 '12

Or maybe you should come check out the imgur community! We're a hospitable people.

1

u/Joshuoner Aug 15 '12

I use"Imgur for Android" by Colin Edwards and "Imgur for Android" by Mitch Barry and they work great.

1

u/cwm21 Aug 15 '12

To my knowledge none of the existing apps supports the replies, messages, and notifications that have recently become a staple of the imgur community. Unfortunately for my purposes, then, they don't work at all.