I'd add that one of the reasons they became so popular is largely due to a very tolerant reddit admin team.
Try to make a similar service today and get growth on reddit the same way and you'll likely get added to the global spam block list.
Reddit has also invested an undisclosed amount, which Mr. Schaaf said was “very small in comparison.” Regardless of size, the investment from Reddit represents a formal business connection between two entities that have so far shared only a legacy and community.
Imgur was originally created as a gift to the Reddit community for easy image sharing, and now has grown to be larger than Reddit itself, pulling in over three billion monthly pageviews. What began as a platform for uploading images, Imgur has become a vibrant and shrewd community of commenters, uploaders and up-voters.
edit
Here's the origin in case anybody's interested
http://www.reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_cre...
If you look at MrGrim's early post history, it's a blatant violation of reddit's anti-spam rule. However, it was (and is) insanely useful and entirely disrupted the image hosting "industry". Even today, the vast majority of MrGrim's posts are imgur posts, which is an explicit violation of the "rules".
It's not a knock against imgur or reddit (I love both), just an interesting observation.
You can violate the rules if you're not obviously a bad actor. In this case, imgur and MrGrim was clearly spam, but it wasn't the bad kind of spam that everybody hates, it was the good kind of marketing where people actually get something useful from the exchange.
edit #2
IIR imgur also had an explicit no porn policy for a very long while, except for NSFW reddits.
edit #3 and an AmA
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur_...
Try to make a similar service today and get growth on reddit the same way and you'll likely get added to the global spam block list.
Reddit has also invested an undisclosed amount, which Mr. Schaaf said was “very small in comparison.” Regardless of size, the investment from Reddit represents a formal business connection between two entities that have so far shared only a legacy and community.
Imgur was originally created as a gift to the Reddit community for easy image sharing, and now has grown to be larger than Reddit itself, pulling in over three billion monthly pageviews. What began as a platform for uploading images, Imgur has become a vibrant and shrewd community of commenters, uploaders and up-voters.
edit
Here's the origin in case anybody's interested
http://www.reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_cre...
If you look at MrGrim's early post history, it's a blatant violation of reddit's anti-spam rule. However, it was (and is) insanely useful and entirely disrupted the image hosting "industry". Even today, the vast majority of MrGrim's posts are imgur posts, which is an explicit violation of the "rules".
It's not a knock against imgur or reddit (I love both), just an interesting observation.
You can violate the rules if you're not obviously a bad actor. In this case, imgur and MrGrim was clearly spam, but it wasn't the bad kind of spam that everybody hates, it was the good kind of marketing where people actually get something useful from the exchange.
edit #2
IIR imgur also had an explicit no porn policy for a very long while, except for NSFW reddits.
edit #3 and an AmA
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur_...