Imgur is bad now
Every night in the seven minutes between when I go to sleep and the baby wakes up for the first time, I scroll through the Imgur app to wind down. Silly videos, memes, and comics are perfect antidotes to being with an infant all day.
Imgur began in 2009 as a side project for a college student when he realized that hosting images to link from Reddit posts was annoying. All the competitor sites were plastered with ads and took forever to load.
At first, you could only get to Imgur from Reddit links. Then, bit by bit, Imgur developed its own community site, complete with a comment section, voting features, private messages, tags, and all the other stuff you’d expect a Standard Social Network to have in the 2010s.
At first, it bootstrapped its hosting costs with donations. In 2014, A16Z invested and Lars Dalgaard joined Imgur’s board:
Each day, 1.5 million images are uploaded to the site, and 1.3 billion images are viewed.
But despite that reach, the company is known for being an extremely small and extremely lean bootstrapped service, led by a founder who likes to say that the only financial investment he’s ever made in the company was the $7 he spent to register the domain name.
That’s about to change.
On Thursday the company announced that it raised $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz in a Series A round of funding.
It’s unclear where Imgur wanted to go - maybe the next Buzzfeed? But if you’ve been reading Normcore long enough, you know how this story went. (See previously: WeWork, Reddit, and Twitter)
Slowly, content started going to the background and ads started popping up, ostensibly to Fuel Amazing Growth.
As of today, Imgur, is somehow no longer profitable, according to a message I got in my mobile app a couple weeks ago:
How they went from being bootstrapped and profitable, to receiving $40 million and not making any money, is anyone’s guess.
Maybe it was spending money on San Francisco real estate:
Imgur’s main working area is on the second floor. The third floor has gathering areas, including a lunch and playroom known as Sweet Max’s, with a pool table, a pingpong table and shuffleboard. A smaller room is used for playing video games and, every other Wednesday, group meditation. Nearby, there’s a roof deck offering a close-up view of the Transamerica Pyramid and Financial District.
Maybe it was paying for people whose title was “Quantitative User Researcher.”
Whatever the case, Imgur on iOS is almost unusable for me now.
It started when Imgur started including ads between “dump” posts, aka posts with a collection of 10-20 images, with a break in between each. In that break would be ads. People got really creative with ways of avoiding these dumps. My favorite was people inserting single words between pictures so that the words made up a story if you read them all vertically.
Now, the dump ad is gone, “because people hate it” (more likely because it wasn’t making enough money), but some fun other stuff is here:
This new experience will contain only two types of programmatic ads (not to be confused with sponsorships ads, like Promoted Posts): 1) A "sticky ad," which will appear at the bottom of all Imgur pages in its own frame. It can be closed. 2) The “interstitial ad,” which appears in between every dozen or so posts as you browse. This has been successful on iOS for over a year and is now making its way to Android. You can swipe normally to skip past it.
The better Imgur’s getting at showing different kinds of ads, the worse it is at rendering actual content.
In this great Twitter thread from earlier this week, we find out that the image is actually the 110th thing loaded on a desktop page:
Imgur is no longer a place to browse memes: it is a content monetization factory, done poorly.
Anyway, the point of this post is, if anyone has a good place to get my meme fix late at night, let me know.
What I’m reading lately:
This thread is very good:
Sure love me some American health insurance horror stories.
Metrics - if you work in data science, show this to your boss.
About the Author and Newsletter
I’m a data scientist in Philadelphia. This newsletter is about tech topics I don’t see covered in the media. Most of my free time is spent kid-wrangling, reading, and writing bad tweets. I also have longer opinions on things. Find out more here or follow me on Twitter.
If you like this newsletter, support it and get friends to subscribe!