Hacker News Reader

It seems like Imgur was profitable from Day 1, but the early days were profitable through donations!

https://www.neowin.net/news/from-rags-to-riches-the-story-of...

Quote: "Imgur has always been profitable right from the very beginning and the only time I ever had to spend money on it was for the initial domain name because as soon as I released it, people liked it so much that they were donating and so Imgur survived for the first six months just purely on donations."

Right... then they took VC $$$$$, over-hired and now they're not.

I'm pretty sure Imgur wasn't profitable and the creator was taking a hit of a few thousand monthly before it became profitable.

He claims in published interviews that the only time he was out any money was for the cost of the domain name.

Imgur profitable since day 1? Give me a break.

I mean now that they've created a social network and are redirecting all image links to their shitty webpage with the cat paw, ok, I believe it, but since day 1 when they were just hosting images? There's no way they were making money off that

Well, they were.

First donations, then using plain old ad networks.

It was bootstrapped for years.