

Accounts gave full image management including editing, deletion, album creation and embedding, and the ability to comment on viral images and submit to the public gallery. On January 9, 2010, Schaaf introduced Imgur accounts, which allowed users to create custom image galleries and manage their images. Album layouts are customizable and embeddable. In April 2016, it was ranked 16th among Alexa's Top Sites in the United States but by April 2021 it had dropped to #51.Īlbums were introduced on October 11, 2010.
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Imgur was profitable at the time, generating revenue from Pro subscriptions and advertising. In April 2014, five years after it was founded, Imgur raised $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Andreessen Horowitz's Lars Dalgaard joined Imgur's board. The move has drawn significant criticism as being indicative of the same fundamental problem encountered by users of other image hosting services ( Photobucket, Webshots) where countless internet resources, many obscure, that relied on the long-term solvency of users' hosted images face the challenge of link rot. The new terms of service went into effect on May 15, 2023.

On April 19, 2023, Imgur changed their terms of service and announced that they will delete "old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account" and "nudity, pornography, & sexually explicit content". Shortly after in January, 2022, Alan Schaaf left the company. On September 27, 2021, Imgur announced that they were acquired by MediaLab AI, Inc., a holding company of internet brands. In 2016, Reddit introduced native image hosting, causing a notable decrease in Imgur submissions on the site. In June 2013 it had 10 employees, and won the Best Bootstrapped Startup award at TechCrunch's 2012 Crunchies Awards. In January 2011, the company moved from Ohio to San Francisco. Imgur used three different hosting providers in the first year before settling on Voxel, then switching to Amazon Web Services in late 2011. Display ads were introduced in May 2009 sponsored images and self-service ads were introduced in 2013. In the beginning, Imgur relied on donations to help with the web hosting costs. "It took off almost instantly, jumping from a thousand hits per day to a million total page views in the first five months." In October 2012, Imgur expanded its functionality to allow users to directly share images to Imgur instead of requiring images to gain enough attraction through other social media sites like Reddit to show up on the popular image gallery.

Imgur was created as a response to the usability problems and lack of file retention encountered in similar services. The company was started in 2009 in Athens, Ohio as Alan Schaaf's side project while he attended Ohio University for computer science. The service has hosted viral images and memes, particularly those posted on Reddit. Imgur ( / ˈ ɪ m ɪ dʒ ər/ IM-ij-ər, stylized as imgur) is an American online image sharing and image hosting service with a focus on social gossip that was founded by Alan Schaaf in 2009.
