As you've seen, Imgflip launched a new homepage and some UI changes for the first time in around 10 years. Believe it or not, one of the first Imgflip homepage designs was somewhat similar to this new design.
Over time, Imgflip has become the #1 tool worldwide for meme creation and templates, with over 100 million total users, and regular usage by the world's top celebrities, politicians, and other personalities (often without the imgflip.com watermark, but scrolling on Twitter/X or Reddit you can sometimes tell which came from Imgflip).
Our mission remains the same: Empower people to create and share awesome images. Our intention with these changes is to refocus Imgflip a little bit on creation and templates, rather than the primary initial thing people see being a "funny image website". In the beginning, Imgflip had targeted this "funny image" concept more, with similarities to Stumbleupon, 9gag, /r/funny and /r/AdviceAnimals, but the world of memes and communication has changed significantly since then. Many people prefer their own personalized experience and memes for their own circles, and less often just a single stream of laughs. Hence, Imgflip is focusing on personalized creation tools and theme-specific meme streams for those who want to participate in the community.
This refocusing meant some obvious changes:
- The default Imgflip homepage should not just be a list of funny images create by users. It should enable people from anywhere in the world to quickly create images and share them whichever way is best for them.
- The Next/Previous/Random image buttons no longer make sense in a global context. It's a little weird and offputting for someone sharing marketing memes to have buttons on the same page which lead to community images with polarized politics or "lol zomg upvote if you agreeee". This flip-style of browsing could still be brought back to Imgflip in some format, but likely at a stream level or in a way that doesn't distract users in the wrong places.
- Imgflip Pro should be more prominent, and advertising should be less prominent. We would love to be able to remove ads entirely because they are generally a detriment to the experience, but from a business standpoint we would need Pro revenue to mostly compensate for it.
DISCUSSION:
We will continue making changes and we want to hear your constructive ideas for evolving Imgflip.
