Image sharing platform Imgur says it has raised $20M from Coil, a micropayments tool that Imgur will build into its service ahead of a forthcoming premium tier
Meme creators have never gotten their fair share. Remixed and reshared across the web, their jokes props up social networks …
Context & Ripple Effects
Imgur's monetization history makes this raise notable: back in 2015 it dropped its Pro subscriptions entirely, making uploads and analytics free while betting on ads. Taking $20M from Coil reverses that bet — the company is rebuilding a paid layer, this time around creator micropayments rather than storage fees.
The deal also gives Coil what a payments startup needs most: distribution. Imgur reported roughly 300 million monthly users by late 2019 (300M MAU), so integrating Coil's tool puts its micropayments rail in front of one of the web's largest meme audiences. The premium tier it foreshadows arrives a year later as Emerald, a $5/month ad-free service, before Imgur itself is sold to MediaLab.
First-order effects
- Coil converts a $20M investment into default placement of its micropayments tool inside a service with hundreds of millions of monthly users — distribution it could not have bought as advertising.
- Imgur gains a non-ad revenue runway and a mandate to ship a premium tier, shifting its product roadmap toward features worth paying for.
Second-order effects
- Meme creators, who the company itself notes have 'never gotten their fair share,' get a first-party path to being paid when their content circulates on Imgur — pressure on rival image and meme networks whose models remain purely ad-funded.
- If Emerald-style subscriptions work, Imgur's ad inventory shrinks at the margins, forcing its advertisers and any ad-tech partners to compete for a smaller free-tier audience.
Third-order effects
- The arc from dropping Pro in 2015, to selling Coil-powered subscriptions in 2020, to exiting to a brand portfolio owner like MediaLab in 2021 suggests standalone community sites struggle to sustain ad-only economics and increasingly turn to hybrid user-pays models — or a sale — to survive.
- Micropayments as a creator-compensation mechanism remains unproven at scale; whether Coil's integration changes creator behavior on Imgur or stays a niche feature is the open question the later coverage does not resolve.
The trend: Consumer content platforms are supplementing or replacing ad-funded models with direct user payments — subscriptions, tipping, and micropayments — as the primary lever for both monetization and creator retention.