Today, memes come home. In the past, memes have been created elsewhere on the Internet, then uploaded to Imgur for rabid fans to consume and share. Today Imgur announces its own Meme Generator, handing control over the process to its users, and making meme creation easier and more streamlined than ever before. Now, creating, saving and sharing memes can happen directly on Imgur.
Our community has been asking for an Imgur meme generator for a long time, so we hope they’re as excited about this new meme generator as we are to deliver it to them,” says Alan Schaaf, Founder and CEO, Imgur. “It just makes sense that as more content is hosted and shared on Imgur, we continue to hand over content creation tools to our community. We can’t wait to see what they come up with.
A popular meme creation tool was recently banned from Reddit over vote manipulation charges, which escalated the Imgur community’s clamor for the company to release a tool of their own. Little did the Imgurians know that the company had Meme Generator in the works. In fact, the tool itself had long been finished, and was merely awaiting integration into the larger site. Even amidst its mobile app launch, the Imgur team launched into action over the weekend, pulling an all-nighter Sunday in order to pull it all together.
Our community made it clear that this had to be done as quickly as possible, so we committed to doing whatever it took,” said Schaaf. “This was no small task – our engineering team rocked it.
Although the build demanded a monumental effort against a tight timeframe, the timing is ideal. Many smaller sites have the basic tools to create memes, however none can do so at the scale that Imgurcan with its audience of more than 80MM users.
Schaaf’s goal with Meme Generator is similar to when he first built Imgur: To go beyond reproducing a commodity product by creating something that would stand out in a crowded market against many similar competitors. “When I look at other products I naturally think of ways to improve upon what already exists. We applied that approach to the development of Meme Generator, and built something we think is better than anything currently available elsewhere.”
Imgur’s Meme Generator features a simple user interface that’s more flexible than other tools. Users drag and drop text boxes while the text auto-fits and re-sizes automatically. Additionally, users can choose from templates of all the most popular memes, or upload and create new memes from scratch. Meme Generator will also feature a Memes Gallery to browse and engage with the most viral memes, and remix memes created by other users.
