Imgur has a little piece of my heart.
On long days (or really any day), as news picks up and I’m writing like a work horse or when news screeches to a halt and I’m bored out of my mind, Imgur is there for me. Paired with the imaginations and (sometimes creepy) senses of humor of my dear colleagues, I get a fun little surprise every hour or so in the form of a hilarious photo or gif.
But I’m not the only one to enjoy the photo-sharing service. The company just announced that it’s reached 2 billion page views a month, up from 1 billion page views a month on February 1 of this year. Imgur has also surpassed 3 million daily uniques — a milestone in and of itself.
Users are currently uploading half a million images a day, and viewing over a billion images a day — that’s a 1,200 percent increase since the beginning of 2011.
Back at the Crunchies at the end of January, Imgur won the Best Bootstrapped Startup award. Founder Alan Schaff then explained where he sees Imgur fitting in in the crowded photo-sharing and hosting space, explaining that an image is different from a photo. “You would put your photos on places like Facebook or Flickr,” said Schaff, “but if you just have an image – which can be like a screenshot, a meme, something you hacked together in PhotoShop – you need a place for those too. We want to be that place.”
Much of this is possible thanks to a service called EdgeCast, which Imgur tapped into in June of 2011. It’s a content delivery network that helps ensure Imgur users enjoy quick upload times and no outages.
And we’re glad the partnership is working out so well for both parties. I, personally, can’t imagine a world without images like these, previously hosted on Imgur, but re-uploaded to our servers:
Known as The Simple Image Sharer, Imgur provides a fast and easy service for sharing images with the Internet. The company offers free image hosting, paid Pro subscriptions, and a robust API. The site also features the Imgur Gallery, a real time collection of the most popular images being circulated on the Internet. Founder, Alan Schaaf, launched Imgur in February of 2009 when he was a Junior at Ohio University. The site immediately gained favor with users of social...
The EdgeCast content delivery network (CDN) helps companies accelerate and deliver static and dynamic content to end users around the world. Major customers include Yahoo!, Tumblr, WordPress, and Imgur. The company carries about 5% of the world’s internet traffic.
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