Interview with Steve Patrizi, Imgur's vice president of marketing and revenue, on how the image-sharing site plans to make money with Promoted Posts
Lara O'Reilly / Business Insider :
Context & Ripple Effects
By early 2016, Imgur had already torn up its first business model: it killed Pro subscriptions and made uploads and analytics free a year earlier, betting that scale — not paywalling power users — was the asset. The native Promoted Posts format introduced in mid-2015, alongside rebuilt Android and iOS apps, was the monetization vehicle waiting for a sales story.
This interview with VP of marketing and revenue Steve Patrizi is that sales story: an executive whose job is convincing brands that a meme-heavy, ad-skeptical community can carry sponsored content. Whether he succeeds determines whether Imgur stays independent — a question the following years answer with video ads, a Coil-funded premium tier, and eventually the MediaLab acquisition.
First-order effects
- Brands gain native ad inventory inside a community famous for distrusting advertising, and Imgur's revenue organization under Patrizi becomes the team accountable for proving Promoted Posts actually converts.
- Users see sponsored posts woven into their feeds for the first time at scale, testing how much commercial content the community absorbs before pushing back.
Second-order effects
- If Promoted Posts revenue holds, Imgur has incentive to build more ad-friendly formats — which is exactly what follows, when the company adds video support and its COO projects profitability with ~250M monthly active users.
- Advertiser demand pushes Imgur toward moderation policies a brand-safe buyer can accept, sharpening the line Alan Schaaf later draws between Imgur and free-speech-oriented rivals.
Third-order effects
- Advertising alone proves insufficient for community platforms of this size, so Imgur layers on alternatives — the $20M Coil investment and planned premium tier — pointing toward hybrid ad-plus-subscription models as the default.
- Independent community sites without durable profits become consolidation targets; MediaLab's acquisition of Imgur and its portfolio of similar brands suggests niche communities end up owned by holding companies that run them for cost efficiency.
The trend: Community-first media platforms are converging on a hybrid model — native ads layered with subscriptions — and those that cannot sustain it are absorbed by brand portfolios like MediaLab's.