Imgur is the latest social media service to add promoted posts to its platform, giving advertisers a chance to reach a huge, untapped audience. The company says this is an effort to make sure Imgur is “around for a really long time.”

It’s not exactly opening up Promoted Posts to the masses just yet. It’s starting by experimenting with promoting certain posts from a select group of businesses.

In a message to users, the company says in a blog post:

Some of you are probably thinking, “Oh great, here come the annoying and intrusive internet ads.” But we’re not going to let that happen. While we’ll learn a lot through these initial experiments and haven’t figured out all the details yet, we can tell you that Promoted Posts will be:

1. Respectful. There will be no pop-ups, auto-playing sound, or timers that make you wait before moving on to the next post. We’ll try not to show you too many of them and we’ll try to make sure you don’t see the same ones over and over again.

2. Transparent. Promoted Posts will be clearly identified with a blue “Promoted” label in the upper right hand corner.

3. Relevant. We want Promoted Posts to be just as good if not better than the other posts that have made their way into your stream. We hope they’ll entertain you, inspire you, and help you discover cool things you didn’t know about. We’ve even hired some Imgurians to help make them.

4. Improving. We’re going to keep working to make Promoted Posts better based on the feedback we get from you.

While it has long had a policy of no NSFW content, Imgur is cracking down on this more now. The company announced that it now has a team devoted to responding to user reports and enforcing the rules better. It doesn’t say that this is directly related to its advertising initiative, but that seems like a likely reason it would start taking this more seriously now.

Imgur also just released a new Android app, which should serve to substantially increase the eyeballs on its content, and of course on its coming ads.

Imgur of course has reddit to thank for much of its popularity. Last year, the company raised a $40 million round of funding, which reddit contributed to.

“Imgur was originally launched on reddit, and we are honored that the reddit community have chosen Imgur to be their de facto image sharer,” Imgur CEO Alan Schaaf told WebProNews at the time. “Until now there was no formal business relationship but now there is, and we are really excited to work closer with reddit to bring some new exciting mutually beneficial features to members of both communities.”

He also told us Imgur would be using its funding to grow teams and hiring in engineering, sales, marketing, HR, and finance.

Image via Imgur