Imgur now has more than 150 million monthly active users

What started off as a side project for a college student that wanted to help people on Reddit share pictures without linking to bloated websites that took forever to load, has grown into a burgeoning startup that has more than 150 million monthly active users. According to Imgur, around 82% of these active users spend more than three hours per week on the website, while another 17% spend more than ten hours. With more than 60 billion memes and cat pictures being viewed every month, Imgur has pretty much become a simplified version of Reddit. 

Imgur is the most popular startup no one talks about. The image sharing and upvoting site has a stunning 150 million monthly users that view 60 billion memes, Cat GIFS, sob stories, and science explainers per month. But considering 82% of them spend over 3 hours per week on Imgur, and 17% spend over 10 hours, you could definitely consider Imgur addictive. People endlessly browse its home page of the most viral images in search of something hysterical, heartfelt, or mind-blowing. Yet in the 6 years it’s been running, Imgur never had someone dedicated to over seeing the engineering that keeps the site from buckling under the load. Imgur’s insanely busy CEO and founder Alan Schaaf originally coded the site, but now he has to manage the business, recruiting, community management and more. So Imgur just hired its first VP of engineering, and he’s already working on a new way to make sure you never leave. Ron Benson has a PhD in neural network artificial intelligence from CalTech, and was the former VP of Engineering at Walmart eCommerce. At both, he learned how to build recommendation engines that understand the relationship between images, and what someone wants to see next based on what they just looked at.