Posted on 06/14/2010 9:25:26 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Three years ago Ben Huh visited a blog devoted to silly cat pictures — and saw vast potential.
Mr. Huh, a 32-year-old entrepreneur, first became aware of I Can Has Cheezburger, which pairs photos of cats with quirky captions, after it linked to his own pet blog. His site immediately crumbled under the resulting wave of visitors.
Sensing an Internet phenomenon, Mr. Huh solicited financing from investors and forked over $10,000 of his own savings to buy the Web site from the two Hawaiian bloggers who started it.
“It was a white-knuckle decision,” he said. “I knew that the first site was funny, but could we duplicate that success?”
Mr. Huh has since found that the appetite for oddball Internet humor is insatiable.
Traffic to the Cheezburger blog has ballooned over the last three years, encouraging Mr. Huh to expand his unlikely Web empire to include 53 sites, all fueled by submissions from readers. In May, what is now known as the Cheezburger Network attracted a record 16 million unique visitors, according to the Web analytics firm Quantcast.
A more recent success for the company is a site called Fail Blog, which chronicles disastrous mishaps and general stupidity in photos and video. The network’s smaller sites include Daily Squee, with pictures of cute animals, and There I Fixed It, for photos of bad repair jobs.
Mr. Huh said his company, which makes most of its money from Web advertising, has been profitable since Day 1.
“Then again, it was just me and Emily in the beginning,” he said referring to his wife, who also works at the company. Cheezburger now has more than 40 employees and has not sought additional investment.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Do not antagonize Kitty.
That would be bad.
ping
My husband visits “I can has cheezburger?” every day without fail. I’ll have to tell him about the other websites.
Tell your husband the links to the other sites are at the bottom of the page of the cheesburger site. There are many there that can easily suck up hours of your day. Failblog and There I Fixed It are my faves!
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I really enjoy the cat pictures. The captions are so clever.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=aftwl354md8
Ping for Mrs. L
And it’s amazing that the cats can type.
That would be bad, desu.
A skill that I have not mastered yet!!!!!!
LOLz
'em Jagoffs prolly got dialup 'nat.
Watch the whole web series. It’s hilarious. Especially the one where they deny having that Pixburgh accent.
“Um gonna go dahn the basement and put some Bahunce in the woosher.”
I love me some lolcats!!:)
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