I have always thought imgur, quickmeme and other meme site (forgot its name) are owned by Reddit owners or executives. It is impossible to get upvotes if you embedded image on your site/blog.
imgur.com is owned by Alan Schaaf, he's not associated with reddit. The reason images don't get traction if they're embedded on a website or blog is because they're not compatible with the reddit clients people use (mobile) and RES (reddit enhancement suite). Most people that use r/adviceanimals want instant gratification, if your image doesn't load in under a second nobody cares and will move on, it's why imgur is so popular: it's fast and consistent.
Conde Nast purchased reddit in 2006, then in 2011 (maybe 2012) it became "independent" again with the parent company of Conde Nast, Advance Publications, retaining an ownership stake of the newly formed reddit, inc. [1][2]
Imgur is a totally separate entity, the company was founded by Alan Schaaf using reddit as a place to "launch" it[3], they've never announced outside funding and there has never been any talk of reddit (or Advance Publications, or Conde Nast) having any ownership stake.[4]
Schaaf first posted about Imgur on Digg, and when it didn't gain traction there he posted it on Reddit. It was disingenuous of him to call it a "Gift to Reddit" in that post.
In what way is imgur not a gift "to" reddit? It might not have been "exclusively for reddit", but I'm willing to be a huge sum of money that most top subreddits, including the first 4 pages of the frontpage are dominated by imgur links.
imgur was the first image host (before minus) that didn't suck, wasn't anti-user, freely allowed hotlinking and had a minimal page when they didn't hotlink.
It's almost never down and the links don't magically fail or expire after they get lots of traffic like many other hosts.
Most "sites/blogs" can't handle the traffic that reddit sends when content makes it to a popular page. Users have learned the hard way that imgur (and a few others) are the only reliable links. Personally, I almost never click any image that's not on imgur because they time out or displaying the image is just incidental to displaying ads.
The creator of imgur was a reddit user who made no attempt to hide it. It was initially done as a side project for the benefit of reddit users and then spiralled into something much bigger. It's this guy: http://www.reddit.com/user/MrGrim
