Photo sharing site Imgur is scaling up its offerings to users by introducing a new analytics service.
The new service will be available to everyone, but if you are willing to pay $2 a month, pro users and advertisers will have access to additional, potentially valuable, information such as referrer stats.
Imgur has always presented itself as a “bootstrapped business,” meaning that the company relies solely on its own resources, without any investment from VC or Angel Capital.
If you are a user of Reddit, or a follower of memes across the Internet, then it is likely that you will have heard of Imgur, and perhaps even use it on a regular basis.
Built specifically for Reddit photo-sharers back in 2009 (the site is now open to all), Imgur ranks images daily according to how “viral” they are (how much they are being shared online.)
According to Forbes, the site has enormous clout to bring potential traffic to your site, with 120 million unique monthly viewers and 1.4 billion individual images being looked at each day.
The site gives you hosting space for your images, as well as direct hotlinking for use on other sites.
In addition to Reddit, Imgur images are also shared on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest – three other huge sources of traffic generation.
You can fully gauge the popularity of a specific image, by seeing what days the viewing figures spiked, as well as the number of comments, favorites, and views. An Imgur spokesperson told WebProNews recently:
“The analytics platform will show all the top referral sources and respective view numbers from each source simply by moving points on the graph, users will be able to narrow down the dates that they want to get analytics from.”
Imgur Founder Alan Schaaf is also promoting the new analytics service as an opportunity for advertisers. But its only those who have the budget to pay up to $10,000 a day for a temporary advertising slot. Images promoting specific products are forbidden, but you can submit a non-sales sponsored image which will still bring potential customers back to your website.
I’m a proud lurker on Imgur and think it’s a great site. I know that all efforts to monetize have met with serious backlash, but the founders should be rewarded for their efforts somehow.
Analytics for images.. hmm.. While I can see that it measures traffic somehow, there is still a question on how this is really valuable. Most image sites don’t have these just because they don’t see it’s need. I have the same problem. I don’t know how this can even become valuable.