[niftich]

Creating communities is hard, but Google wants a unified 'Google' community, not multiple disparate ones -- just look at how they handled YouTube.

Even if you throw in some machine learning to figure out if the user's looking at memes or gifs or porn, I can't imagine the marginal value of that data being of use to Google. It's essentially unmonetizable, which is why most image hosts disappear after a few years.

Imgur was successful in avoiding that fate by pivoting to a community, but that community would be of no use to someone like Google.

[aaronbasssett]

Especially as Imgur is already giving Google that information for free (from the Imgur source):

    <script type="text/javascript">
        Imgur.Util.getGoogleTracker();
        __ga('send', 'pageview');
    </script>

[dzdt]

What makes you think this is free?