Imgur might be a website known to many that hosts images, especially GIFs, but it appears that Imgur will now be expanding their hosting capabilities and will now include videos as well. Speaking to TechCrunch, Imgur COO Roy Sehgal claims that the company is on track to become profitable later this year, and hosting videos should help with that.This is because they can now include video ads which will appear alongside video uploads as well. This is not an uncommon strategy as we have seen companies such as Facebook and YouTube rely heavily on ads in videos to generate revenue. In fact YouTube has made a business out of it and has opened the doors for people to find alternative sources of income.
According to Sehgal, “We’ve been making the transformation from an image community to a community-powered entertainment platform. We realized there was a vector of content we were not supporting that we thought our users would want.”
That being said, Imgur users will now be able to watch videos on its website and if you’re looking to upload videos onto its platform, it appears that this functionality is limited to iOS users for now via the app. Imgur claims that eventually it will open up the feature to more users, but they did not provide a timeframe as to when that might happen.
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