[Adirael]

Bandwidth have been going down for years. I don't think they release numbers but the community in imgur is pretty active. There's a lot of people browsing imgur directly (they have a voting system, comments...) and know nothing about reddit.

They have a lot of direct traffic to compensate for the cheap hotlinking.

[minimaxir]

Speaking of direct traffic, Imgur will redirect direct links to images posted on social media sites to the ad-filled image page: http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/moved-temporarily/

[McElroy]

I think your blog post was bad. First of all, they have really unobtrusive advertising so it's a non-issue to start with. Second of all, it's their money paying for the traffic so how they choose to respond to HTTP requests is up to them. If people don't like it, they stop using imgur. If people don't mind, all is ok, imgur get their revenue and users get their cat pics.

[DanBC]

Imgur is "bigger" than Reddit - at least, it has several tens of millions more uniques per month.

[tjbiddle]

Not to mention a surprisingly large amount of people don't know what Reddit Enhancement Suite is - so they're going directly to the Imgur page when viewing.