Company: Imgur, San Francisco, CA
Company Description: Imgur is the Internet's visual storytelling community. Millions of people visit Imgur every day to explore, share and discuss the best visual stories the Internet has to offer. More than 60 billion images are viewed on Imgur each month, and Comscore ranks Imgur among the top 100 sites in the US.
Nomination Category: Company / Organization Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Company of the Year - Internet/New Media

Nomination Title: Imgur

Tell the story about what this nominated organization has achieved since January 1 2014 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms.

Imgur (pronounced “imager”) is the Internet's visual storytelling community. Every day millions of people visit Imgur to explore, share and discuss billions of images. As viewers vote and comment on images they are organized into a continuously updated stream of the greatest visual stories on the Internet.

Imgur 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. 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.

“GIFs work because the punch line is instantaneous,” says Imgur founder & CEO Alan Schaaf, “It’s entirely different from almost any other form of content on the Internet, which takes time to consume.” “We want to conquer the internet in terms of self-expression and viral images.”

Imgur’s is profitable expects to either double or triple its 13-person team over the next year, 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 130 million monthly unique visitors posting images and searching for jolts of humor and insight among over 60 billion images being viewed. Imgur’s users upload about 1.5 million images a day and spend an average of 10 minutes on the site (more than the average time spent on a well-known porn site, Schaaf says).

Imgur’s content isn’t shaped by friends or follows. Everyone sees the same images on the home page, ranked by popular vote. Top posts can get thousands of comments and tens of thousands of votes. “Imgur is a shared experience,” says Schaaf. “I don’t see posts because I follow a certain person but because it was voted up through a democracy.”

Recent new developments available to the millions of followers known as Imgurians include:

• Imgur iOS: The new app reimagines the experience of browsing through its massive collection of photos, GIFs, and other images. "The app is beautiful," Alan Schaaf, Imgur founder and CEO, tells The Verge. "It's just absolutely beautiful and the best browsing experience for Imgur period, that exists."

• React: makes it easy to communicate with GIFs across mobile applications. A simple interface within the Imgur iOS app allows Imgurians to browse GIFs organized by expressions and then share them in other mobile apps with just a few taps. Launched in collaboration with Facebook, Schaaf said "Messenger is one of the best places for people to express themselves online, and we're excited to bring React to that experience."

• Topics: provides a way to discover content quickly within Imgur’s main navigation pane. It enables users to find things more organically than with tags alone. Topics allows advertisers to know where their ads will be seen by the most relevant audience and provides a powerful tool for attaining the most views.

• Free For All: Site is fully ad-supported and free to use.

• Unlimited Storage: All accounts have unlimited storage of images.

• Analytics Tools: Allows tracking of how often an image has been viewed.

• Camp Imgur: Planned inaugural event featuring equal parts meetup, festival and conference.

Imgur is creating a loyal worldwide community of users with its unique categorization and organization of the innumerable images available at any time on the Internet. Using dynamic new means of communicating with its users it is vastly improving on the Internet experience as a whole. The innovations that have been implemented are proving valuable to millions of people on a daily basis. Research, competence and new developments continue to build upon their success and keep their aim true to their goal, “…to conquer the Internet…:

In bullet-list form, briefly summarize up to ten (10) of the chief accomplishments of this organization since the beginning of 2014 (up to 150 words).

• Over 130 million monthly unique visitors posting and searching among 60 billion images being viewed.
• Users upload about 1.5 million images a day
• New developments available to the millions of followers known as Imgurians include:
• Imgur iOS: The new app reimagines the experience of browsing through its massive collection of photos, GIFs, and other images.
• React, Launched in collaboration with Facebook. makes it easy to communicate with GIFs across mobile applications.,
• Topics provides a way to discover content quickly within Imgur’s main navigation pane. Topics allows advertisers to know where their ads will be seen by the most relevant audience and provides a powerful tool for attaining the most views.
• Site is fully ad-supported and free to use.
• All accounts have unlimited storage of images.
• Analytics Tools Allow tracking of how often an image has been viewed.
• Camp Imgur - inaugural event featuring equal parts meetup, festival and conference.

Of the following measures of success, which ONE do you want the judges to most appreciate about your organization's story of achievement since the beginning of 2014?

Overall Innovation