Mother of God:

Last month, Imgur served up over 3.6 billion pageviews and 56 million unique visitors per month. A year ago, it had just hit 1 billion pageviews per month and was still run by a team of just three people. Since then, Imgur has hired four more engineers and is still adding to its team.

We caught up with founder Alan Schaaf and COO Matt Strader earlier this week to talk about the company’s evolution over the last year. When Schaaf launched the site from his dorm room in Ohio with a post on Reddit in 2009, he said he wanted to create “an image hosting service that doesn’t suck.” That clearly worked. Today, the site gets over 255 million visits per month and the average user spends 11:30 minutes on the site and sees 14 pages per visit, Imgur tells us.

40 percent of all pageviews now come from direct visitors to the site. Schaaf and Strader attribute this to the launch of Imgur’s gallery feature in October.

In the long run:

Imgur wants to become a destination site that’s synonymous with image-based memes and viral images, just like YouTube has become the go-to place for videos. Looking ahead, this means Imgur will likely develop its own meme and animated GIF generators, for example, as the service starts adding more content-creation tools to its lineup.

As Schaaf noted in our interview, the company has gone through an interesting transition since its launch. In the early days, people would create images, upload them to the site (which hosts them on Amazon S3) and then share them on Reddit and other social networking sites. Soon, that process could look very different, with many users creating the images on Imgur, storing them there and getting lots of viral traffic from within the site itself.

Imgur is also on track to release its own official mobile app later this month.

Sweet.