Imgurs Shitty Ads, one users solution

A big portion of the community is frustrated about the incorporation of ads but there’s another group that doesn’t see why^^

Here’s the thing, a few years ago we had this option. Believe it or not a few years back we had the OPTION to opt-out of ads by buying an imgur pro account. It was $25 a year, and we had a larger uploads, larger storage limits and no ads. But then one day we got this email from @Alan. (Uploaded wrong image, image of full email in the comments)

They took away our ability to bypass ads and were promised (see red arrow) one small ad. It was frustrating and in the beginning I was like you. “Imgur’s gotta make money. It sucks but hey, I get it.”

First it was only the website, and the app and the mobile site were exempt. Then ads came to mobile site & the app. But then the ads got malicious and it took imgur forever to do anything, an issue that still happens. After that imgur started inserting ads between posts, and now they’re every 5th image in a single post, not to mention the bottom ads above the comments. Not to mention the invasive user tracking scripts that have been exposed coming from imgur.

Here’s what we are asking. We want an ad-free OPTION, just like imgur used to have and just like Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, & Hulu all currently have.

I don’t want imgur to give up money or be a non-profit, I just want them take mine instead. Hell, what’s the number they’re giving investors or selling for media buys? When imgur is forecasting the estimated dollar amount spent by an average user per month or year, what is that cost? Let me buy my way out. (BTW, doing media buys in a previous life I know how OBSCENELY low that price is.)

We are asking for the option to pay a yearly fee, or a monthly subscriber fee, in exchange to not see advertising. You could even go the tiered route of imgur silver (Users see far less advertising but occasional ads; ads you can charge marketers higher amounts for) & imgur gold (high cost to user & no advertising.)

Because here’s the deal imgur; you can take our money and give us what we want, or a myriad of Adblock apps will take our money and give us the experience we want. The later is already winning which is revenue you’re missing out on. We get you have bills to pay, but we are asking you to give us the option to opt-out of the ridiculousness in exchange for our money.

tl;dr: Ads suck. For users that want it, please give us the option to buy/subscribers an ad-free experience.