

Imgur gets $40 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz - jeremymcanally
http://betabeat.com/2014/04/imgur-gets-40-million-investment-from-andreessen-horowitz/

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Qualman
Going way back on Reddit, I remember MrGrim modestly posting that he had
created an image host just for Reddit, imgur.com. It's pretty wild to see him
and imgur have come this far.

EDIT: Here it is--5 years ago. Great job MrGrim.
[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/)

EDIT2: Nevermind, I was beaten. :)

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giarc
Crazy to think that all it would have taken is a few redditors to downvote
that post and it would have been hidden and never seen.

Right place, right time perhaps.

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lowglow
I'm glad it worked out for Alan. When I post to Reddit about things I've
built, I just get downvoted. hah

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pkfrank
Very impressive to have bootstrapped this far, I'd imagine their hosting costs
are fairly immense. Hopefully this doesn't affect their core value-proposition
(simple image upload).

It's interesting that Reddit also made a modest investment. As Imgur's
community has grown, I'd imagine that they're increasingly battling for the
same audience as Reddit.

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doctorcroc
About Reddit and Imgur - I think they share a more synergistic relationship. A
lot of imgur links make up the content on reddit, and by funding them, they
ensure a better experience for their visitors. Meaning more ad revenue for
reddit - makes sense to me.

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pavanky
imgur has had voting, comments and it's own little community for a while now.
It could cannibalize the image macro based subreddits (like /r/pics /r/funny)
which drive so much traffic to reddit.

imgur is also not getting as much money as it could from reddit because links
are posted directly to content bypassing the ads.

I wonder how much longer the synergistic relationship will continue to exist.

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harvestmoon
If Reddit banned imgur, that would be very bad for it. They banned Quickmeme,
which decimated its traffic.

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DavidBradbury
Quickmeme was banned because they were manipulating the voting system. I don't
think imgur would or needs to do that.

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joshdance
Not super knowledgeable about image hosting or ad revenues. If you have a
super populate photo, would the ads on that page pay enough for the hosting?
If that is true, repeat by a million and Imgur has a great business. If not,
seems like it will be difficult.

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______1
Most people that use Imgur share the direct link to the image. When the direct
link is used no ads are displayed.

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zimpenfish
It's a wise choice - the comments are often terrifying.

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giarc
In design or quality?

I commented on an image I posted once. I was horrified to find that you had to
individually expand each child comment. Doesn't allow for much discussion.

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claudius
There’s an ‘Expand all comments’ link. Personally I find the community there
to be a nice complement to HN. Less serious, less important issues, more
usable when tired.

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zimpenfish
Let's hope they use some of it to fix the mobile app (fatally broken on my 5s
7.1) and their mobile web experience (a catastrophe of hanging AJAX and
appalling UX.)

Oh and hiring some moderators to control the flood of soft porn in user-sub
would be nice.

(Although it does worry me - people taking money and board members from A16Z
do seem to get acquired by the biggies rather more often than I'd like.)

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petercooper
I wonder if user-sub is _already_ moderated and they actually allow the 'soft
porn' through? At least, there's quite a bit of hardcore pornography hosted on
imgur but I don't see any on a browse through user-sub right now.

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zimpenfish
[http://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/201738527-Gallery-
Ru...](http://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/201738527-Gallery-Rules)

Since user-sub lives under imgur.com, I'm assuming it's covered by those
guidelines (tl;dr: "no porn, work safe, or hellban")

I'm guessing they'd rather keep the porn under /r/

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ChrisArchitect
good stuff that they're hanging on but still pretty big mystery how this
sustains.... there was optimistic talk/posts about how the community _on
imgur_ itself has grown and become sort of its own thing but of course the
synergy with reddit is undeniable. Ad revenue while allowing all that direct
linking is highly suspect IMO. Reddit enjoys huge dominance but lest we all
forget it was all but headed for dead before Digg's big slip up. Surprised
they have funds to throw at imgur but I guess it's a mutual interest thing.

