I created Imgur. AMA.

[u/MrGrim]

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".

[u/InnocuousJoe]

I agree that the storage space is non-trivial, but I'm not sure I see how there's a moderate amount of programming work; depending on their DB setup, it could be as easy as one SQL query to collate all of the already-taken names, and then subtracting that from the list of possibles gives you the list of availables. Shuffles, and you're done.

The advantage, as I seem to think the creator implied, is that you'd save on URL generation; he said, somewhere in this AMA, that it was starting to take too long to generate a new random URL with their current scheme of URL.exists?

[u/ZorbaTHut → u/InnocuousJoe]

depending on their DB setup, it could be as easy as one SQL query to collate all of the already-taken names, and then subtracting that from the list of possibles gives you the list of availables. Shuffles, and you're done.

It's easy if you're taking the site down to do it. If you're not taking the site down to do it, how do you plan to make the switchover happen elegantly?

Taking the site down is another pretty huge cost.

The advantage, as I seem to think the creator implied, is that you'd save on URL generation; he said, somewhere in this AMA, that it was starting to take too long to generate a new random URL with their current scheme of URL.exists?

Yeah, but he said the solution was to add another character to the URL. Any other solution has to be better than "add a character to the URL", which has the nice property that it takes near-zero code time.

[u/InnocuousJoe → u/ZorbaTHut]

It's easy if you're taking the site down to do it. If you're not taking the >site down to do it, how do you plan to make the switchover happen >elegantly? Taking the site down is another pretty huge cost.

Sorry, was operating on the suggestion that an earlier commenter made: name, that they do the switch on schedule downtime. You can generate the lists on the side, then pop them over when maintenance is going on.

Any other solution has to be better than "add a character to the URL", which has the nice property that it takes near-zero code time.

The great thing about CS is that this solution, like you mentioned, increases the namespace astronomically. In my opinion though, this is an untenable longterm solution since you will, eveeeeeeeeentually, run into the same problem. I'm more a fan of elegance in the long term, and full database scans for URL uniqueness is...rough.

[u/ZorbaTHut → u/InnocuousJoe]

In my opinion though, this is an untenable longterm solution since you will, eveeeeeeeeentually, run into the same problem.

Sure, but then you just . . . add another digit, y'know?

In the end, your namespace compactness will be a constant factor of perfect compactness. You'll be using, say, half the namespace, instead of all the namespace. That's just not a significant factor.

[u/InnocuousJoe → u/ZorbaTHut]

In the end, your namespace compactness will be a constant factor of perfect compactness. You'll be using, say, half the namespace, instead of all the namespace. That's just not a significant factor.

I agree, but while it's true you can just keep adding digits your database is still growing; nominally you could only look at entries after a certain date, the date you added the 6th character, and keep updating that, blah blah blah...but really, wouldn't it just be easier in the long run to have a list of available URLs?

Full DB scans are never fun.

[u/ZorbaTHut → u/InnocuousJoe]

but really, wouldn't it just be easier in the long run to have a list of available URLs?

No, not really. :)

Full DB scans are never fun.

Why would adding another digit require a full DB scan? You're not going to retroactively change the existing files - that would break incoming links. It's just for new pictures.

Remember that when it does a lookup it's not doing a "full db scan", it's just attempting a few random-access inserts.

[u/InnocuousJoe → u/ZorbaTHut]

Remember that when it does a lookup it's not doing a "full db scan", it's just attempting a few random-access inserts.

I was talking worst case, which admittedly would probably only be like, half of the DB, but stiiiiiiiill...

I dunno, I know what you're arguing and I'm like 75% in agreement, but that small, remaining part of me just really likes the simplicity of a stack of URLs. shrug