With 150m monthly visitors, the image-hosting site "blows BuzzFeed, Reddit and even Tumblr out of the water," writes Jack Smith. But it's now at the tipping point from useful mess to "media empire," and that's where things get murky.
Imgur is betting that it can mature into a full-fledged social network and take its place among the Facebooks and the Reddits, the great Silicon Valley Internet titans. Its leaders, a brother-and-sister team from Ohio, claim Imgur can scale without sacrificing its youthful spark or that warm, tight-knit feeling that makes its community so special.
The fact people are talking about this so specifically suggests we're very much aware of what the arrival of venture capital means for internet things! Anxious, insistent, top-down talk of "community" is an acute symptom; anguish over "how to advertise to discerning millennials" is a chronic one.
