This is quite a slippery slope. If I host a website in one country, I do not necessarily care where people access my website from. It is not like I actively provide a service to them - they just use internet (decentralised network) to access it. What if I publish a newspaper here, someone takes it where the contents are illegal, am I accountable?
> We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law
In that context it's completely fair to say "leaving doesn't absolve you of past transgressions".
Edit. If Imgur made any revenue from UK users then it becomes impossible to claim plausible deniability on any definition of "providing a service". If the UK can do something about this is a different matter. They could make CEOs/board personally or even criminally liable for the company's failure to pay a fine but probably won't.
I sell a advertising package from my US HQ based self serve advertising portal to a British company who use the service to advertise to customers in the UK. Ok - kinda UK revenue. How about 'To advertise to customers in the US' well it's getting highly debatable.
What about I sell advertising packages to a US company from my US HQ but someone in the UK views and advert on my site and therefore generates me 0.001¢ - debatable.
Not entirely sure what is debatable about this situation. You quite unambiguously derived revenue from a UK citizen here, although not much. If you didn’t want that revenue, then don’t display ads in the UK. If that makes serving traffic to the UK uneconomical, then don’t serve traffic to the UK, problem solved.
In practical terms, nobody’s give a crap about you making a couple of dollars here and there incidentally from UK citizens. It quite another matter when your business is clearly dependent on deriving revenue from UK citizens, and you take zero steps to try and comply with UK law.
It’s pretty simple, if you want the revenue, the you have to follow the law of the countries your deriving that revenue from. Don’t want to follow the law, then simply don’t try and derive revenue from putting adverts in front of citizens from that country, or by collecting and selling their data.