How Imgur Became a Photo-Sharing Hit: They didn't rate limit or show ads to referers from reddit.com.<p>Before imgur we had imageshack.us which built it's success on forums.somethingawful.com. ImageShack's attempt at jumping on the Next Big Thing, yfrog.com, was thwarted when twitter added their own image sharing.
Imgur is one of those sites where noone believed it would last, due to the vast amount of money it takes to run a site like that (at the time) and it being the main way people posted images to reddit.<p>Glad to see it has lasted and has a community built around images posted from reddit. :)
In another article a few days ago, someone mentioned mediacrush (<a href="https://mediacru.sh/" rel="nofollow">https://mediacru.sh/</a>) which is an open source alternative to imgur. After the rumors about a sale to Yahoo, I personally prefer an open source site to have my data rather than Yahoo...
They solved a problem for a highly engaged network, making it simple to post and share an image in formats necessary for forums and not tied to identity. The first time I used Imgur, it was so simple, so delightful and so not monetized I wondered how it would last.
Active discussion on reddit from yesterday: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2409uc/til_imgur_is_creating_tools_that_will_let_users/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2409uc/til_im...</a>
I think it's worth revisiting the discussion we had here a while ago when they rose their VC. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7524216" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7524216</a>
Now that Andreessen invested a huge amount in them, I'm counting the days until it's being acquired by Facebook. Seems to be his modus operandi. An easy 20x ROI with this strategy.