Imgur.com Has Become the 35th Most Visited Site in the U.S.: Meet Its Creator Alan Schaaf Part 2
Back in 2009 I met a young man named Alan Schaaf. Alan had created a site called Imgur that was catching fire. It was becoming THE photo hosting site for social aggregation sites like Reddit and Digg. Two years and 6 MILLION visits per day later, Imgur has become one of the biggest sites on the planet and growing at a 20% PER MONTH rate. Alan and I have kept in touch over the years but I figured it was time for him to update us on how everything was going.
Well Alan, a lot has changed since we last talked. First of all, congratulations on being nominated as Best Bootstrapped Startup in the Crunchies awards.
Thanks! The Crunchies nomination is really exciting.
I understand that you somehow managed to graduate from college and then moved. Tell us a little about where and why?
I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science in June of 2010 and continued to live in Athens, OH, building up the site on the cheap until everything was ready to make the move out to San Francisco, which I did in July 2011. I chose San Francisco because of the great connections, opportunities, and talented people that are out here. This place has great energy and you can really feel the startup culture. It’s great to finally be out here.
Let’s cut to the stats. Imgur has grown to one of the most trafficked site in all of the Internet. Give us an idea of the numbers on a daily. Visits, pageviews, pictures submitted etc.
Per day, there are about 400 thousand images uploaded, 6 million visits, 3 million unique visitors, 55 million pageviews, 70TB of data transferred, and Alexa.com has us as the 35th most popular site in the US.
What’s the growth rate on the site and at this time next year how many daily visits would you expect?
The site grows around 20% every month on average. That means next year at this time we should have grown 140% (take the stats from the last question and multiply them by 2.4).
That’s amazing. Do you have staff to help you manage the site since it’s gotten so big.
There are 3 fulltime employees, including myself, and a few part time people back in Ohio. However, we have 7 open positions that we’re hiring for right now.
Those numbers sound like they would take an incredible amount of server space. I see you use Edgecast, the Content Delivery people that sites like Break.com use. What prompted the switch from your previous supplier?
Edgecast is a top CDN with really great performance and competitive prices. Since site performance is a big priority for us, the switch seemed like a no-brainer.
What does something like that cost a month? If you don’t want to give your price, what would it cost someone else in today’s market?
CDN prices vary quite a bit, but for a small site, you could expect to pay between $0.15 and $0.20 per GB of bandwidth. If your site is much bigger and transferring terabytes of data per day then it’s much cheaper and could be between $0.02 and $0.05 per GB. However, that’s just for the bandwidth. You also need servers, storage space, etc.
The last time we talked you were getting close to breaking even without taking into account your time. Are you making money now?
Traffic has grown tremendously since then and we have some really top tier advertisers now. I’m excited to say that Imgur is now profitable and growing!
I noticed you were having trouble with the ad providers. From sound ads to possible infected ads. What are some of the challenges when dealing with advertising. Have any plans on hiring a salesperson to help sell ads?
I work with these companies called ad networks, which work with individual advertisers that pay to put their ads on your site. I then work with this company called Rubicon that works with hundreds of ad networks. There’s this huge web of advertising going on and I never see or get to approve the ads before they start running. In truth, I have absolutely no idea what ads are running on the site, nor will I ever. This is the same for any site that uses ad networks and doesn’t sell advertising to individual advertisers, which is any site that doesn’t have their own sales team.
Eventually I’d really like to start selling more direct ads and bypassing the ad networks, but this is more of a long-term project once I have a bigger staff.
Has anyone made any serious offers to buy Imgur from you? Mind giving us a number that you’ve turned down (I know you don’t like talking about this stuff but the readers love numbers)
I’ve had a few serious offers, but I can’t talk much about them. Sorry!
Is Imgur what you do for a living now or do you have other financial interest ?
Imgur is my fulltime job and basically my life, and like I mentioned earlier, we’re also hiring.
Are you currently working on any other projects? If so you mind sharing?
No other major projects right now. Any smaller cool things I work on usually find their way onto Imgur.
And a few personal questions.
You have a girlfriend? How about a pet?
I have a girlfriend who’s living with me in San Francisco right now. I also have a German Shepard dog named Goku. They’re both awesome.
What kind of car do you drive? Has it gotten better since Imgur became a success?
I don’t have a car. I drive a 125cc Yamaha Vino scooter. Don’t judge.
What do your parents think of all this?
They’re both really proud, but I’m not quite sure they grasp the scale of it yet. My mom is still wondering why I’m in San Francisco and why I need any employees.
What group is the most played on your ipod?
My iPod photo broke a few years ago. I’m mostly into internet radio now and spend most of my time listening to the stations on DI.fm.
Final question. Who’s the most famous person in your contacts of your phone?
Ben Huh from icanhazcheezburger, but I haven’t talked to him in a few years. I like having his number handy though.
Friday’s Big List of Domains At Auction or Dropping 1-27-12
Here we go again. Another rough day of names. Remember you don’t have to spend money. Just kidding we have to spend a little each day but let’s not spend too much on these. Not the cream of the crop. Tough picking today. Here you go. Be Careful. PS if you really want to screw up your day, buy one of those Facebook typos.
6495.com Great numeric. I see $2k a coming.
BehaviorModification.com I always tell me daughter this is what she needs. In reality, probably more what I need but isn’t that what parenting is? Teaching them to be the person you wish you were.
Blitzers.com Some think wolf, some think football. I think reindeer. No bids for obvious reasons but it IS a 13 year old domain
PPCx.com The pay per click gets your attention and the X wows you.
NameDetectives.com Here you go. Put Fusible out of business. Blogging, the only industry in the world where a business model can be built on getting up before everyone else.
BestRecord.com Anyone else used to spend two week with their face buried in the Guiness Book of World Records as a kid. Then I would spend the next two days trying to think which one to break.
CCorporation.com Help them set a C corp up. Still not sure why people pay so much to start companies whose name begins with a C.
What Did Bob Parson’s Get On His IQ Test?
Barbecue Sauce. In all seriousness, we certainly need to thank Bob Parsons, Godaddy, Oversee, and dot co for their recently added attraction to DomainFest, Natalia Velez, the new Dot Co Godaddy Girl. She will be joining DomainFest attendees at the SuperCars event aka the new Playboy Party without the 70′s venue and water born illnesses. Every year DomainFest seems to keep the goodies piling on. They haven’t forgotten their target market with this years’ theme (made up by me) Hot cars, hot women, cool seminars.
To take a closer look at Natalia you can see the new commercial or go to her website. I on the other hand, am going to get even closer look in person at the event. Fortunately for me the restraining order will expire on Wednesday and the event is on Thursday. Luck be a lady tonight.
Your Social Media Account Is Now Your Resume
Ay yie yie. Here we go again.
I’ve well documentated the fact that I’m not on social media. I joined Facebook once and found myself avoiding people I didn’t want to talk to more than I was “networking socially”. I don’t have a Twitter account because I honestly don’t think that anyone wants to know what I’m doing. Well apparently someone does, and that someone may be my future employer.
I’m referring to an article at the Wall Street Journal today documenting a developing trend in companies’ reliance on an applicant’s social media accounts instead of resumes to gauge whether the applicant would be a good fit with the company. The trend seems to be starting with companies are in the social media space, which makes sense.
A resume consists of words on a page and more and more companies are looking for something else. Social media accounts, video applications, etc. are ways of getting a feel for the type of person someone is, a way of getting a grasp on their personality. While I don’t think resumes will ever fully go away for a lot of industries, i.e. mechanics, tradesman industries, etc., I think that more and more technology companies will start looking outside the traditional box. Looks like I better get on Twitter. Want to follow me?
GoldChains.com Sells for $32,000 At Sedo’s Recent Auction
Goldchains.com hit a pretty good number today at $32,000. I would imagine that will be one of the higher sales in next weeks top sales. I’ll try to gather the final prices of this sale later today. I’d also like to toot my own horn again as Gentler.com is almost done and sits at $2300. It was a featured name on our list and it sat at $350, adding $2K. Would it have gotten there on its own? Maybe but being the arrogant fool I am, I’ll call it the DomainShane effect in action yet again.
Update: Gentler.com finished at an amazing $5100. There were only 3 bidders but 2 of them did all the bidding. Proves once again that all you need is 2 bidders to drive up the price. Congrats to the seller.
You Know Why You Can’t Find An Available Dot Com? Because 100 Million of Them are Already Taken
According to DomainTools.com , there are now over 100 million dot com domains under registration with Verisign. Currently the dot com tld add 22,000 new registrations per day and as of yesterday there were 99,837,548 domains shown taken using DNS lookup. Add in the 2.1 million .com domain names in either Redemption or Pending Delete status and the 400,000 “dark domain” or domains that don’t resolve and you’ve surpassed the 100 million mark. More great news for those of us that own premium dot com and more great info from DomainTools. Take a look below at the complete report
DomainTools Estimates Verisign Manages Over 100 Million .COM Domains
DomainTools, the recognized leader in domain name research and monitoring, announced that, according to their projections, there are already more than 100 million concurrently registered .com domain names. A number of organizations track the .com domain registrations by simply reading the Verisign daily zone file, a methodology that underestimates the current count. According to DomainTools, their research shows that the .com count is already well past 100 million.
Verisign, the registry behind .com, publishes a daily “zone file” of registered .com domain names with their associated nameservers. Yesterday the zone file listed 99,837,548 .com domain names and that number has been growing by an average of about 22,000 net new .com domain names per day so far in 2012. There are, however, two general categories of domain names that exist but are not listed in the zone files.
The first category is well known, at least to people who work in and around the domain industry: domains in the Redemption or Pending Delete periods. Each day tens of thousands of .com domain names hit their renewal date and move into a multi-stage expiration process. During the Redemption Period, which is usually 30 days, domains can still be renewed by the prior registrant. These domains are no longer included in the zone files and are also not available for the general public to register. There are currently 2.1 million .com domain names in either Redemption or Pending Delete status.
The second category is much less well known, a category DomainTools refers to as ‘dark domains’. Domain names that exist, but are not pointed to nameservers, are not listed in the zone file and therefore not counted by most sites that track domain registration data. An example of such a domain is Spectrum.com; it exists but has no nameservers, and does not resolve to a website. Another example is theexpertcare.com; the Whois record indicates a fraud alert on the domain name and a ‘suspended’ status. This domain is also not in the zone file and yet is certainly not available for anyone to register.
Only Verisign knows for sure how big the list of dark domains is, but DomainTools has conducted ongoing proprietary research which reveals over 400,000 known dark .com domain names. This count is included in DomainTools’ recently updated domain statistics data on their DailyChanges.com website. DomainTools’ calculation of .com domains includes those listed in the zone file plus the dark domains. With that information in mind, DomainTools calculated the current total of domains managed by Verisign to be over 100.2 million.
Thursday’s Big List
Sedo has a pretty good auction closing today. Going after a few names myself. Of course you won’t see those names on my list. That would be silly. While I have you. Anyone interested in me doing a daily newsletter of names with no bids? Let me know, in the meantime here are today’s names.
Gentler.com Call me soft but I really like this name. With 15 bids it seems that other people agree. Under $500 is a good price IMO
Soulmates.com I don’t think it will meet reserve but a beautiful name for a matchmaker site.
BestApartment.com 13 year old domain. I don’t want AN apartment, I want the BEST apartment
MobileGadjets.com Easy easy build out on this one. I just wish more people could spell gadgets.
Sunm.com This one’s hot
TheNationalDebt.com An easy build out. Just put that rolling debt thing they have in New York on the page.
TheMarketingCompany.com Don’t hire A marketing company. Hire “THE” marketing company. TheMarketingCompany.com There’s your ad. Your bill for my services is $10. Send it to my paypal Shane$10@bgum.com$10 Take out the $10
TVTU.com It’s good because it has TV in it. Speaking of TV. I was reading my “goals” that I had set in 1991. One was to read 50 books in a year (I did it that year) and get a TV. Funny how important that was back then. Now I have 5 in my house.
KidsDentist.net Sure I wish it was a dot com but easily worth $69
Kelly.tv I know a girl named Kelly and she likes tv. I may email her Actually, Namejet has a ton of name.tv domains up today.
ILL.net As an Illinois resident I had inquired about this domain a while back. It looks like its dropped in value since then. I may buy this at the new low low price.
Real Estate Developers Spend $50 Billion On Projects, Don’t Bother To Secure One .COM For $8
Very interesting article today over at a Vietnam based website describing a situation that I have well documented as one of my biggest pet-peeves. Apparently the Vietnamese are simply behind the times (according to the article, not me) when it comes to registering domain names that correlate with real estate development projects, company entities, or just about anything in general I’d assume.
According to the article, which you can read here, nearly $50 Billion has been spent on real estate projects in Vietnam without one matching .COM being registered by the developing companies. In other words, while the Becamex Tower was being built, nobody from the real estate development company picked up BecamexTower.com. Instead, one person picked up every single domain and is using for marketing of their own site.
The following excerpt from the article pretty much sums it up…
“Khoa said that he accidentally read on newspapers about the setting up of a lot of huge real estate projects, while he knew that no one bothered registering the domain names. Therefore, Khoa decided to spend money to buy the domain names.
According to Khoa, the total investment capital of the huge projects which lost domain names may reach 50 billion dollars.
The fact that many real estate projects lost the domain names has raised the question about the marketing and project development capability of the real estate developers.
Tien phong has quoted experts as saying that once the domain names, called as the “souls” of the projects are lost, the confidence of customers and finance investors in the projects would decrease, which would lead to many other consequences.”
See that last part? Very very interesting. By simply not registering the matching domain name, the real estate developers may potentially lose investors because of the lack of confidence it brings. In other words, if the company developing the projects aren’t savvy enough to grasp simple 21st century marketing concepts, what chance is there that they will successfully promote the project and make it a success?
Companies take note, it just goes to show that $8 for a domain name is probably the most important money spent on a $100 Million project. It is such a simple concept, but so many times so easily overlooked.
Guy Needs To Borrow $13 To Renew Domain Name He Accidentally Forgot About
If any of you have an extra $13, a guy over at Reddit needs a few extra dollars to renew a domain name. He’s a little short and could pay you back next month or so. He’d really appreciate it. The details are below. On a side note, I was wondering if I could borrow $23.50 from someone. I forgot to pickup my dry cleaning for DomainFest and I’m a little short. I could pay you back in 5 or 6 months after Godaddy pays me for one of my premium sales.
Wednesday’s Big List of Domains At Auction and Dropping Around the Information Highway 1-25-12
Oops. Forgot to hit “publish” so a little late. So happy to see Apple blow away the numbers. I make a lot of economic predictions and invest my money accordingly. I’ve made a ton of wrong calls but I sticking to my guns in Apple over the last 10 years has more than made up for all the mistakes. Domains can do the same thing. One great sale can more than offset the dust bunnies. Now onto the names.
HealthReform.com Now THIS is something we all need
CoffeeRoast.com Never heard of cooking a roast basted in coffee but I may not be exactly on the right track of the definition of coffee roast. Not a big coffee drinker. 1996 Birthday
ForSaleSigns.com 13 year old domain. I didn’t realize there was a market for these until I put my home up for sale. I wanted a fsbo type sign but something better than what I could do myself. I ended up getting one online. In case you’re wondering. I sold the house but as you know, I’m a hell of a salesman.
KingstonNY.com Kingston will always be the capital of New York in my mind. I don’t care what they changed it to. 1998 Domain
BuyCertificate.com You’d only have to sell a few SSL certs to make this pay off.
GetThisJob.com Nice call to action domain. 13 year old domain
RobotCovers.com Get way way way ahead of the trends. Everyone WILL have a robot and most certainly we’re going to need covers for them. 1996 Domain
LibraryManager.com Libraries are more than just a place where they keep books although after talking to some of my readers I will have to explain what a book is as well. 1999 Birthday
LasVegasHome.net I think the 18,000 searches and the $11.73 CPC overcome the dot net
LondonBridge.info I don’t know if this domain has any value but I heard the bridge was falling down
TrashKing.com I may be called this if my lists keep coming out like my last two.
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