ImageShack and the Free Hotlink

NOV 22 2003 · 12:00

All Your Base Are Belong To Us, the canonical Zero Wing animated meme. Hotlinked into thousands of forum signatures across 2003 and 2004 via the free, no-account image hosting ImageShack provided. Place: Los Angeles, California Figures: Jack Levin, founder · the early ImageShack engineering team Jack Levin and partners launch ImageShack in Los Angeles on 22 November 2003. The product specification is exactly what the forum web needs and exactly what no incumbent is offering: upload an image (GIFs included) from any browser without an account, receive a permanent URL and a BBCode tag suitable for paste, no bandwidth limit, no per-image fee, no expiration. The site eats the cost; the forums get free inline images. Within eighteen months ImageShack is the default host for every phpBB and vBulletin forum running on the English-language web. Photobucket (founded 2003) and TinyPic (2004) build the same model in parallel. The animated GIF, which had been bandwidth-prohibitive for hobbyist forum operators to host themselves, suddenly works at scale.