Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imgur has a community. Tons of users that goes directly there to see funny images and GIFs. Yes, Google can create a infinite scalable image hosting overnight, but creating a community is a lot harder.
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…
Imgur.Util.getGoogleTracker();
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