Imgur

About

Imgur (pronounced imager, stylised imgur) is an online image hosting service, launched in 2009 by Alan Schaaf^[1]. It is primarily known for its free hosting and heavy use by the news aggregation website reddit.

History

On February 23, 2009, Alan Schaaf created the image hosting Imgur. On the same day, Alan (Reddit handle MrGrim^[2]) posted a thread on the /r/reddit.com subreddit on Reddit called “My Gift to Reddit: I created an image hosting service that doesn’t suck. What do you think?” containing a link to Imgur^[3]. The post received over 2100 upvotes and over 670 comments since first posted. Within the first year of launch, Imgur has “sprouted into a hotbed of online culture”, serving almost 20 million pageviews a month^[4].

Traffic and Bandwidth

According to Imgur’s monthly site statistics^[5], for the monthly period between 11th of October to 10th of November, 61,627,977 images were uploaded and image views were 29,976,799,540. Bandwidth used has reached 3.67 petabytes. The site has an Alexa rank of 98 in November 2012^[6].

Features

The most attractive feature of Imgur is its simple uploading feature, as opposed to competing image hosting services like Photobucket and Imageshack. Imgur also has an Application Programming Interface (API) where third-party developers can manipulate the full functionality of the site, to create their own services like web applications and mobile applications^[7]. The site also has a PRO feature, which raises the image hosting limit to unlimited (as opposed to 255 images for standard accounts)^[8]. Imgur also has some uploading tools for web browsers (Firefox and Chrome) and Content Management Services such as Wordpress^[9].