
Born of Reddit, Imgur now dwarfs the ‘front page of the Internet’ - r0h1n
http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/26/imgur-traffic-milestone-100m-uniques/
======
sequoia
My take on why imgur is on top (I've been using & evangelizing it for a couple
years): They initially picked one thing (image hosting) and did _everything_
possible to remove barriers & friction to getting that task done.

Ways to upload to imgur include clicking upload button, using file dialog;
dragging and dropping onto the webpage; OSX dashboard widget (used this one
when I was on mac); windows context menu (right click send to imgur); chrome
extension; FF extension; bash script; wordpress plugin... basically any way
you can think of, you can put images on imgur _quickly_. Oh and not blocking
3rd party referrers, and actually doing a good job of handling images makes a
big difference. To the latter point: I was uploading images from iOS to
wordpress but the orientation was in the EXIF data. WP ignored this so my
images were rotated the wrong way... use `convert` to fix them 1x1 = pain in
the ass. Select images, drag/drop onto desktop, group as album... surprise
surprise: imgur orients the pictures properly automatically.

The UX on imgur is what I'd call a case study of good UX, basically the best
I've seen on any website. Kudos to imgur, they deserve all the success they're
getting. /fanrant

~~~
Peroni
Absolutely, 100% in agreement.

It took me less than 5 seconds to upload this image and get my hands on a
unique, neat URL leading to said image:
[http://i.imgur.com/1o3iJe1.gif](http://i.imgur.com/1o3iJe1.gif)

The process:

* Type: imgur.com & hit enter

* Drag image from desktop and drop

* Hit enter

* Click (optional)

* Done.

No prompts to log in or create an account. No need to navigate to an 'upload'
button. No prompts to share on various social media sites. No intrusive
adverts.

The sheer simplicity and convenience is immense.

~~~
8ig8
With great power comes great responsibility.

Probably not worth worrying too much, but it is important to keep in mind the
terms of the site. Your cute or clever meme may end up on a T-shirt.

> With regard to any file or content you upload to the public portions of our
> site, you grant Imgur a non-exclusive, royalty- free, perpetual, irrevocable
> worldwide license (with sublicense and assignment rights) to use, to display
> online and in any present or future media, to create derivative works of, to
> allow downloads of, and/or distribute any such file or content. To the
> extent that you delete a such file or content from the public portions of
> our site, the license you grant to Imgur pursuant to the preceding sentence
> will automatically terminate, but will not be revoked with respect to any
> file or content Imgur has already copied and sublicensed or designated for
> sublicense. Also, of course, anything you post to a public portion of our
> site may be used by the public pursuant to the following paragraph even
> after you delete it.

[http://imgur.com/tos](http://imgur.com/tos)

~~~
actionscripted
So what you're saying is, Imgur needs to partner with a clothing and
accessories company and REALLY make some money.

~~~
8ig8
They already have a store, but I don't see them trying to sell anything based
on user uploaded content although it seems to be within their rights if they
wanted to.

[http://store.imgur.com/](http://store.imgur.com/)

------
TheBiv
Awesome example of a company that doesn't try to be everything to everyone and
just focuses on the one thing they do very well.

Just please don't try and emulate their success in your startup, bc it likely
won't work. These guys won the side-project lottery so an amazing kudos to
them.

~~~
nonchalance
> These guys won the side-project lottery

This is far from the truth. There was a clear demand for free image hosting
that is easy to work with, and imgur fit the bill.

~~~
SwellJoe
I remember the post that launched imgur.

It really was a scratch your own itch kind of thing. So many redditors
complained about the crappy image sharing sites...lots of them were verboten
to use on reddit because they were so spammy, or slow, or whatever. There was
no clear leader in the image sharing space. Facebook was impossible (because
it wants to own every user and won't let you show someone something without
logging in), even if it were an acceptable place to upload weird random
pictures (I know many people who do, but they just don't know about reddit and
imgur yet). So...imgur's founder saw a very clear need, and humbly pointed
redditors to it.

It took off because it was amazing in its simplicity and sincerity. imgur's
founder _clearly_ wanted you to share funny pictures in imgur, even if he
couldn't figure out how to make it pay him money for every image. He just
wanted to solve a very real problem that caused millions of people tiny
amounts of pain. (When picking a problem, pick one that causes either a few
people a _lot_ of pain, or one that causes a _lot_ of people a little bit of
pain. You're unlikely to find a problem that causes a _lot_ of people a _lot_
of pain, since those are already usually very competitive.)

~~~
nikcub
> It really was a scratch your own itch kind of thing.

I agree. They make it look lucky because they executed so well. Good
entrepreneurs have a habit of making it look easy to outsiders (Zuck was lucky
because he was at Harvard and had the right connections, etc.)

There is a new problem of this type at reddit and other sites if somebody
wants a project idea to work on. The problem is animated GIF's. At the moment
most animated GIF's are too large, not optimized and the sites are slow.

This has been a constant long-term complain on some of the sports subs that I
frequent that post highlights from games. You press the button to display the
animated GIF inline and it loads a couple of frames a second and takes 10-30x
the GIF length to load. There are two factors here:

1\. A lot of people don't know how to optimize animated GIF's. You don't need
24 or 30 frames per second where 8 will suffice, and you don't need full image
quality on mobiles or tablets, or even on desktops. You can cut down the frame
rate automatically and scale up the compression for some clients to load
faster.

2\. A lot of the regular hosts are overloaded and slow.

A service idea for animated GIF's would be to specify a video to cut from then
have the service automatically create and load desktop, mobile and tablet
versions with low frame rates and hosted from a decent CDN. The regular
posters are now using Google+ since it loads, but they haven't solved the
optimization part.

You don't have to spend a lot of time online to see and identify these pain
points, you just have to be in the right mindset where you notice them and can
identify the opportunity.

edit: If anybody wants to do this, email me (in profile) and i'll send you my
notes. It is something that I considered putting together but I don't have the
time. I did do some research though (i'm a mod at some sports subs). If you
serve optimized versions for different devices then that would be a good
reason to get submissions linking to an HTML page rather than hot-linking to
an image.

Pipeline would be:

    
    
        upload video -> convert to 3 optimized version -> visitor lands on your HTML page -> serve version based on UA
    

running these services isn't as expensive as what it used to be, CND's are now
cheap. imgur is profitable with 12 staff and running on AWS, with no ads.

~~~
thristian
A lot of people got all excited when sites like YouTube and Vimeo added
support for HTML5 video, believing the <video> element was The Future Of
Special Sites You Visit To Watch Videos. Given that YouTube still uses Flash
exclusively for a whole lot of content, I'm not sure that's going to work out.

On the other hand, I believe the <video> element could be The Animated GIF
Killer. GIF compression is terrible _especially_ for video, and I'm sure with
some tweaking of compression options you could make a .mp4 video with higher
quality and a fraction of the size of the equivalent .gif. If there were some
site like Imgur that let you upload some small video fragment, let you do the
appropriate timeline snips, and automatically created a nice small .mp4 and a
fallback .gif, that would be truly excellent.

Give it a maximum video length of 10 or 20 seconds and pre-load the site with
a bunch of the more popular reaction GIFs like the Picard Facepalm and Orson
Wells clapping, and you should be good to go.

EDIT: Looks like [https://mediacru.sh/](https://mediacru.sh/) does at least
the GIF->MP4 encoding, although it misses imgur's handy "here's how to use
this on your site" examples.

~~~
ijk
Except part of the reason GIFs are popular is that everything at least sort-of
supports them, even _Internet Explorer 4_.

~~~
thristian
I expect that will be a common belief long after it ceases to be a true
belief. There's still people that avoid PNGs because "they don't work properly
in Internet Explorer" but most vaguely web-savvy people wouldn't bat an eyelid
at a PNG today. I want the same thing to happen for HTML5 video: the latest
version of every major browser supports it, including Internet Explorer, and
including mobile browsers; the biggest limitation I can think of is forum
software that doesn't yet have <video> on its whitelist, but time (and a bit
of targeted complaining) should solve that too.

------
codexon
The reason why Imgur got so big was because all the other image upload
providers started monetizing themselves by blocking direct links and limiting
traffic. No one else wanted to be stuck with huge bandwidth bills on hard to
monetize reddit visitors where most of them have adblock.

For some reason people feel obligated to link to the Imgur page instead of
directly to the image. This allows Imgur to make money off the ads on the
page. Maybe this is because the founder made it seem like he made the site
just to solve Reddit's image hosting problems for free(he also made a similar
announcement on Digg).

Without this support and the growth of unlimited bandwidth servers, I don't
think Imgur would have became so big.

If they decide to disallow hotlinking or add more intrusive ads, another
replacement would pop up. This is probably why the founder wants to focus on
getting revenue in a different way.

~~~
mbesto
> _founder made it seem like he made the site just to solve Reddit 's image
> hosting problems for free_

I can't find the reference, but IIRC he (the founder of Imgur) didn't make any
money for the first couple of years, as the bandwidth costs were crazy high.
But he was happy to do so, because it helped the community there.

> _Without this support and the growth of unlimited bandwidth servers_

Without the support of his community he wouldn't have made it. I also remember
him saying something along the lines of "I make no money to pay for bandwidth
if you reference the .jpg file itself, but I still allow it. So I simply just
ask the community to use the Imgur URL". It became part of Reddit culture to
do the latter, because the users valued the service.

TL;DR - Provide a valuable service, don't piss of your users, and you can
actually make some money.

~~~
ToastyMallows
From the article:

> The company is also profitable, and it has been since about a year after the
> site launched. Schaaf declined to share the specifics on what those profits
> are, but they are at least high enough to have moved the Imgur team from
> their roots in Ohio to a snazzy new San Francisco office with 10 full-time
> employees and three contractors/part-time workers.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
If you guys do want an alternative, I'm struggling to get MediaCrush [1] more
popular. It's a lot better [2], but imgur is imgur. The hardest part is that
Reddit (admins and moderators, that is) is actively supportive of imgur and
actively hostile towards alternatives.

[1] [https://mediacru.sh](https://mediacru.sh) [2]
[https://blog.mediacru.sh/2013/07/19/MediaCrush-for-
nerds.htm...](https://blog.mediacru.sh/2013/07/19/MediaCrush-for-nerds.html)

~~~
VMG
Minor point from the blog:

> The only thing we store about you is your hashed IP address when you upload
> a gif. It's impossible for us to get your original IP address from this.

What algorithm do you use? It's not that hard to brute force all 2^32 IPv4
addresses with SHA2 -- (even less if you exclude improbable ones)

~~~
kefka
Let me tell you a little secret: Apache has these things called logs that can
"reveal" the IP address of another computer. And so can the evil hacker tool
'netstat'.

Do you trust this service or not? Don't trifle around with stupid shit like
this.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
We're running on nginx, and we told it not to log IPs. You'll obviously have
to take our word for it. Even if you don't take our word for it, it's no worse
than most other sites, which do log your IP.

EDIT: Or you can run a self-hosted instance of MediaCrush, it's open source:
[https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush](https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush)

~~~
kefka
That was precisely my point: TCP doesn't work with a spoofed IP connection
while maintaining state. So you usually have to use your IP address or a
middleman like TOR or a proxy.

And then you have to trust the endpoint: you.

And frankly, I get sick of the undue and infinity-about paranoia. It gets
tiring hearing again and again.

------
Maxious
Relevant reddit links:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to...](http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting)
(2009 - launch of imgur after 2 months of side project coding)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9tlwi/im_the_imgur_guy...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9tlwi/im_the_imgur_guy_ama/)
(2010)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur_ama/)
(2011)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/eicjf/im_the_imgur_guy...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/eicjf/im_the_imgur_guy_ama_part_two/)
(2012)

------
thejosh
I remember when this started, and I was amazed that the guy was willing to
risk massive fees for little reward (at the time).

Very happy they have grown it into what it is today - fast, clean and stable.

It's what imageshack could have been.

~~~
Pxtl
Exactly. When I first saw Imgur, my immediate reaction was "nice site, but
this guy is going to bankrupt himself in a few months - look at the horrible
ways other image-sharers have to abuse their users to stay profitable". I
didn't think it was sustainable.

Shows what I know.

------
001sky
_Aside from the traffic milestone, another crop of impressive Imgur numbers
involves the amount of funding the company has taken, which is exactly zero
since launching in 2006. The company is also profitable, and it has been since
about a year after the site launched._

Interesting to see where this goes.[1] It is a great story.

[1] see, eg: [http://techcrunch.com/2007/05/07/myspace-to-acquire-
photobuc...](http://techcrunch.com/2007/05/07/myspace-to-acquire-photobucket-
for-250-million/)

------
treelovinhippie
I've always thought Reddit as a community and platform was massively under-
leveraged. So what other problems do Redditors have?

My Reddit experience these days seems to be nothing more than using RES to
scroll through images. I miss the good old days of in-depth discussions that
were across the site and not just pushed into subreddits.

~~~
redthrowaway
> So what other problems do Redditors have?

Ironically, content discovery.

Reddit's biggest problem is that the big subreddits are incredibly homogenous,
and the small ones incredibly slow. If you want to read good, in-depth
analysis of world affairs, then you'd better agree with the popular sentiment
on /r/worldnews or /r/truereddit. If you don't, you're SOL.

Often, the good content you find is in the comments. However, this
necessitates digging through thousands of comments that are generally low-
content. This causes pain.

Want to solve a problem redditors have? Find a way to separate the wheat from
the chaff.

~~~
TillE
There's no "good, in-depth analysis" of _anything_ on the default subreddits,
regardless of your political leanings. The whole demographic and mentality has
shifted towards younger and younger teenagers.

What you really need is reddit for adults, a site with an entirely different
culture that leaves the memes and unfunny jokes behind in favor of encouraging
actual conversation on any given topic.

~~~
B-Con
> There's no "good, in-depth analysis" of anything on the default subreddits,
> regardless of your political leanings.

Politics isn't a good

The best content on reddit that I find comes from niche communities. There are
some really subject-specific knowledgeable people on there. You see those
posts come through /r/bestof, which is just submissions to those gem comments
that people find. It's worth subscribing to, but even that is a lot of noise
to signal.

The only main/large subreddits I'm subscribed to anymore are /r/programming
and /r/todayilearned. The other 50ish are for specific interests and hobbies.

Side rant: I swear that /r/technology went from a mature community of
technically literate and rational people to a bunch of politically-charged
kids obsessed with long-range scientific discoveries and product feature
announcements in about a year. It was painful watching that happen. The patent
war saga of yesteryear was the last straw that betrayed the community for the
juvenile crowd it had become.

------
adventured
Imgur solved a problem for Reddit the same way TwitPic solved a problem for
Twitter.

I think it's a testament to Reddit that - unlike Twitter - they didn't feel
like they needed to consume image hosting for their platform. It also spurred
the growth of the meme sites. I'm sure Reddit will spawn more large niche
sites yet.

~~~
agumonkey
For some heavily graphical subreddits (r/funny and such) the imgur subcategory
is almost better, you skim faster through a gallery than through titles list.

------
Lrigikithumer
I think a bit tribute to Imgur's success is the fact that it has the same
content as reddit's front page, just a lot less of the internal politics and
bitter comments that tend to drive people away from the site.

------
Miyamoto
Two questions:

1\. Why is imgur not #1 on Google when I search for "image hosting".
Postimage.org has that, but they take far less traffic than imgur.

2\. When will we get video hosting that is as easy to use as imgur? That means
not having to register to upload and share videos.

------
moozeek
He started out with PHP (Kohana framework AFAIR), wonder if they still use
it...

------
GuiA
I remember having that itch a few years before imgur happened; I shared a lot
of screenshots with friends.

I wrote a PHP script that did fast upload with a minimalistic look and popped
in on a server and bought a domain name for it; it got used pretty heavily in
my group of nerdy high school/college friends.

But I never gave it any more thought, and just open sourced it a few years
later (it's on my github I believe).

------
gcb0
Makes one think decent image sharing is still an unsolved problem that any
half done solution grows very fast.

who here even heard about Game Neverending? ...what about Flickr?

------
ck2
... and is just as unprofitable ?

Not that profit is everything but are they losing money daily?

~~~
danielsamuels
You can tell who didn't read the article before commenting.

------
gopalv
imgur succeeded because you could press arrow-keys and browse through their
most-viral dumps.

------
theklub
Countdown to imgur buy out...

------
dvliman
though I can't figure out how they monetize imgur..

