Imgur just announced the launch of a new analytics platform that will enable brands and marketers to track the viral life of the images they upload. Given that Imgur sees upwards of 100 million unique monthly visitors, this is a pretty significant offering. It hosts over 650 million images and attracts up to 1.5 million uploads on a daily basis.

“The analytics platform will show all the top referral sources and respective view numbers from each source,” an Imgur spokesperson tells WebProNews. “Simply by moving points on the graph, users will be able to narrow down the dates that they want to get analytics from.”

Here’s a look at an example image and its corresponding analytics.

The basic analytics data showing daily view metrics will be available to all users.

“Paid users ($24/year) will get a closer look into how their images moved around the internet using the referral tracking data,” the spokesperson says. “We plan to add the hourly breakdown as well for engaged social users and brands that need that type of granularity.”

“As one of the world’s top entertainment destinations, we have a huge opportunity to build out the data and analytics piece of our business and to create advertising channels that drive new revenue streams for the company,” says CEO Alan Schaaf.

Read our interview with Schaaf here.

The company says the data its analytics provides “dovetails nicely” with its new native advertising business. It offers sponsored images that are inserted directly into the Imgur Gallery as the top image of the day. They’re spotlighted in the top left corner of the Gallery and in-stream as users browse the site.

“They look and function as all other organic content on the site so users can engage with branded content by voting, commenting and sharing,” an Imgur spokesperson tells WebProNews. “We work very closely with brands and advertisers to ensure that the sponsored image content fits in with our community so they are successful for our ad partners.”

Imgur has recently run successful sponsored image campaigns for Paramount’s Anchorman 2 and Rock Star Games’ $1 billion launch of GTA V.

You certainly don’t have be a marketer to appreciate data about how well your images are doing, but Imgur’s increasing popularity (in no small part thanks to reddit) will make this a pretty important tool in viral campaigns.

Images via Imgur.