The company was started in 2009 in Athens, Ohio as Alan Schaaf’s side project while he attended Ohio University for computer science. Imgur was created as a response to the usability problems encountered in similar services. Designed to be a gift to the online community of Reddit, it took off almost instantly, jumping from a thousand hits per day to a million total page views in the first five months. Imgur became widely recognized following its rise to popularity on social media websites such as Facebook, Reddit, and Digg. In October 2012, Imgur expanded its functionality to allow users to directly share images to Imgur instead of requiring images to gain enough attraction through other social media sites like Reddit to show up on the popular image gallery.