Imgur.com understands social media better than any other image-storage service on the Internet.
“How the hell did flickr get through our defenses?”
They started by posting high-quality, original humorous images. They then got the attention of Reddit but being the “go to pic place”. Digg and other social news sites are starting to get it.
How did they get so strong so quickly? They kept it simple.
- Shortened URL instantly
- Two clicks to post
- Link straight to the image without ads
- ???????
- Profit
They are everything that tinypic isn’t. You don’t need an account. You don’t need an email. You find an image, post it, and score. It owns the Pics subreddit, a huge one with over 130K subscribers. It’s the most common image source on Digg now with more front pages every day. In short, Imgur understands how to appeal to social media users. If alexa is to be trusted, it’s worked. Their reach has increased by 392% in 3 months and they are closing in on being a top 2000 site in the world.
While they aren’t nearly as big as imageshack, tinypic, or flickr, it should only be a matter of time for them to build up the site-bulk required to compete with other image services. Either way, we give them mega-kudos to really understanding Web 2.0.
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This post was written by...
JD Rucker – who has written 512 posts on Soshable | Social Media Blog. JD Rucker is a social media enthusiast who resides in Orange County, California. He works simultaneously for 2 companies - TK Carsites (an Automotive Internet Marketing Firm) and Hasai (a Social Media Strategy Firm). He writes for several publications including BusinessInsider, Fast Company, Techi, Top Cultured, and ICanHasInternets. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
The only problem with Imgur is it’s greatest asset – the fact that there’s no centralized account structure means that it’s hard to go back and find your images.
Of course, this is really only a problem for Imgur, since it means people post the same image multiple times
. BTW the creator if Imgur, Alan Schaaf, is awesome.
Alan Schaaf smells like poo.
Alan Schaaf is a huge jerk.
It’s really nice except that it doesn’t quite host back the original image, even though it calls what it hosts “original”. It performs a small, lossy operation on the image to make the file smaller. It’s a very small change. And still much, much better than TinyPic.
I also liked http://www.shareApixel.com
It doesn’t have as much future as imgur, but I liked the fact that they’ve got a gallery, and you get the code on the same page you clicked the upload button