300M-user Imgur launches Melee, a gaming meme app
3Reported today on TechCrunch
For the full article visit: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/05/imgur-melee/
300M-user Imgur launches Melee, a gaming meme app
10 years after debut, 300 million monthly user Imgur is one of the last massively popular yet unpersonalized home pages on the internet. Since everyone sees the same upvoted posts when they open Imgur, it creates a shared experience full of inside jokes and running gags. But while you can switch to a feed of topics and creators your follow, Imgur has focused on a one-size-fits-all approach over catering to niche audiences.
The gaming community deserved better, and Imgur needed to seize this opportunity. Video and board game tags were the most popular on Imgur, with 46% of users following them. Esports, Twitch, and streaming stars like Ninja have gone mainstream. And there's a whole world of esoteric memes about absurd in-game moments, highlights from epic wins, and commentary about the industry. That stuff gets diluted and buried on cross-functional apps like Imgur, is tough to easily browse on Reddit, and often times content about all games is mashed together even though you might only play certain ones.
That's why today, Imgur is launching Melee, the company's first app beyond its flagship product. Melee lets users subscribe to the games they love to get a feed of memes and gameplay clips. It's an elegant way to prevent you from seeing jokes you don't understand or feats of skill you don't care about. You can also scroll through a popular posts feed if you're curious about unfamiliar games. Melee debuts today on iOS with an Android version coming in Q1 2020 and a desktop version down the road.
"Gamers are constantly taking recordings and screenshots of the games they're playing" Imgur founder and CEO Alan Schaaf tells me. "But we found that there's no place for gamers to share those cl