I launched AwesomeGIFs as a place to find and share reaction GIFs, back when that was still a novel idea. It landed on the front page of Reddit a few times, specifically r/gifs. And it was some of the most fun I’ve had because I did it entirely for fun writing captions, and it took off.
Sometimes in the #images app for my messages, I’ll see a GIF from there pop up. One that was pretty popular was this one:
This also had an iOS app and spawned an ecosystem of sites, such as AwesomeLOLs and HappyGIFs.
Watermarks? #
If you’re wondering why there’s a watermark, two reasons: one, I made this and other GIFs by hand in an ancient piece of software called Macromedia Fireworks. Two, I allowed hotlinking. The hotlinking caused my host to shut me down, then some massive AWS bills after. Thankfully, and weirdly, the ad revenue covered it.
I eventually stepped away from it, as it just ran it course, and wrote about why.