Blog Focus On The Cheezburger Network Empire
Blog Focus is Technorati's daily roundup of the top stories as told by the bloggers of the world. Each day five posts, no matter how popular or nascent, will be selected by editors to portray a general unscientific reaction to discussion points around the 'Net.
It’s hard to believe that just a few short years ago, the term “LOLcats” would bring blank stares instead of knowing and grinning nods. As we’ve seen, there’s a manic craze to see pictures of cats doing all kinds of delightful and strange activities, accompanied by funny/ironic/sarcastic descriptive text often of a dialect all its own.
moar funny pictures
Thus, the I Can Has Cheezeburger empire was born. Advertising Age interviewed Cheezeburger Network CEO Ben Huh to find out about the man behind the lolz, prompting reaction from around teh Interwebz:
• Advertising Age: The blogs are, in a sense, perfect media properties for the web. All the content is user-contributed and culled by editors. The company has been profitable since its first quarter, monetizing almost entirely via ad networks and Google AdSense. Are the kittehs taking over the world?
• 901am: I love hearing these kinds of success stories although having seen the industry from all sides I don’t envy anyone having to run this type of machine. It’s a hard life that requires a lot of work and lots of tough decisions especially in this digital economy. But Ben Huh has done a marvelous job building an impressive empire of hilarious sites.
• Digits: AdAge asks, “Are you funny?” “I love the fact people think I do this out of my garage! I am a business person. Let’s put it this way, no LOLcat I have ever created has made the home page.”
• Gawker: They've got 21 full-time employees, 30 blogs, and 11.5M visitors a month.
• ValleyPop: Posts a LOLCats picture of a cat sitting on top of a bunch of European-looking currency with the caption, “o hai, im just chillin, monetizing mah blogz.”
Follow Technorati