If you’ve ever been on reddit for more than about five minutes, you’ve heard of Imgur. The site ( which is pronounced “imager,” not “im-gur”) is easily reddit’s favorite image hosting service. Of course, Imgur’s popularity doesn’t just come from reddit. In fact, Imgur is among the most popular websites in the world. To prove it, Imgur announced today that they had hit 2 billion page views per month. That represents a doubling of the site’s traffic from 5 months ago, and a staggering 1200% growth over a year ago.
In an interview with AllThingsD, Imgur founder Alan Schaaf talked about his company’s current state, its business model, and its growth. Acording to Schaaf, Imgur has only once been in the red: when he shelled out the $7 necessary to register the site’s domain. From that point on, the site has not failed to turn a profit.
Schaaf attributes Imgur’s success to its popularity on reddit, and a business model that is fiercely devoted to customer preference, at the expense of possible revenue streams. For example, Schaaf estimates that only about 10% of the pages viewed on Imgur have ads, and the ones that do only have one ad per page.
Though not all of Imgur’s traffic comes from reddit, a huge portion of it does. Reddit itself is an enormous entity with millions of pageviews, and Imgur is the site’s go-to image hosting service. Don’t believe me? Check out a screencap of the r/pics, a subreddit devoted (as the name suggests) to pictures:
Imgur is continuing to develop, as well. In addition to experiments with advertising and content creation tools, Imgur is also preparing its own mobile applications, as Imgur Director of Communications Sara Schaaf told WebProNews last month.