The humble Reddit image dump has grown into a massive community in its own right. Reddit needs Imgur. But does Imgur need Reddit?
Via: imgur.com
Chances are if you've heard of Imgur, you've heard of it in the context of Reddit.
Imgur's easily the most popular image host for Reddit users, and that isn't an accident. It was created by Reddit user Alan Schaaf in 2009, as a place that could both store images and handle massive surges of traffic — images linked by Reddit would often be removed from places like Photobucket for pulling in large amounts of traffic once they were linked to. Imgur, on the other hand, proudly flaunts its data stats: The top image on the site today has burned through over 63.54 GB of bandwidth.
Imgur's popularity with Reddit users has been blamed more than a few times for turning Reddit into a 4chan-style image board rather than a place to find interesting links. But image-heavy subreddits — think /r/funny and /r/wtf — are what have made Reddit huge, and, for many casual users, form the backbone of the site.
Via: alexa.com
But Imgur is growing into something more than a backbone. According to Alexa rankings, Imgur has outranked Reddit in traffic for at least six months. Imgur's founder Alan Schaaf says the site is growing between 5–10% a month and doesn't find the Alexa rating differences that surprising. He says he sees Imgur content as inherently more social.
"The images end up all over the internet," Schaaf says. "Essentially, Imgur makes it really easy for your image to go viral."
Schaaf started the image service while he was enrolled at Ohio University. Imgur, four years later, has 13 full-time employees with a headquarters based in California.
As of September 2012, more than 25 million images were uploaded to the site each month.