How Imgur Became a Photo-Sharing Hit

There is a website where cats and dogs rule the day, profanities are common, and clips from Lord of the Rings movies can be used to convey universal sentiments like the joy of revenge. All right, there are plenty of websites like that, but this one is more popular than those of the Weather Channel and the New York Times. Although it looks like just another photo-sharing hub, it’s the best example yet of how a new generation of Internet users prefers to express itself.

Imgur (pronounced “imager”) is a place to post and browse GIFs, the Internet’s de facto file format for pictures and short, punchy animated clips designed for sharing on social networks. The company has only 11 employees and is located in a seedy San Francisco neighborhood, on the fourth floor of a low-rise building whose lobby combines the scents of trash and disinfectant. Yet Imgur’s already profitable, thanks to a stream of display ads from movie studios and video game publishers, and is well on its way to becoming one of the highest-traffic sites in the world, with more than 120 million monthly unique visitors posting images and searching for jolts of humor and insight. “GIFs work because the punch line is instantaneous,” says Imgur founder Alan Schaaf, 26. “It’s entirely different from almost any other form of content on the Internet, which takes time to consume.”