Mr. Cole may want to consider the possibility that Tunch is not pulling his weight in our new Internet-enabled world:
… 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.
[…] 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… Mr. Huh said his company, which makes most of its money from Web advertising, has been profitable since Day 1.
[…] As the company has grown, so have the opportunities to make money, said Todd Sawicki, the company’s chief revenue officer.“Only 1 percent of what gets submitted goes on the Web site,” he said. “The rest we can turn into T-shirts, books and other content that the audience loves.”
This year alone, Mr. Sawicki said, the company will generate a seven-figure sum from advertising, licensing fees and merchandise sales.
[…] Most of the material the company posts is created by readers, who can Photoshop a funny caption onto an image or remix a popular video in minutes and submit it to one of the Cheezburger sites for consideration. The company says that each day it receives more than 18,000 submissions from readers.
[…] The tricky part, said Kiki Kane, 36, who oversees new site development for the network, is gauging whether an Internet trend has legs. She aims to introduce a new blog every week.
It’s probably not even necessary to mention this is at the top of theNYT’s “Most Popular – Technology” email list.
Third Eye Open
I can haz a freaking break?
Mike Kay
This speech is OBama’s “I can haz cheezburger” moment!
Face
Lemmie see if I got this right — the bloghost does almost nothing but maintain a server, while the readers supply all the good pics and taglines? They put some on the web, some on coffee mugs and rake in the cash?
I had no idea blog advertising was that profitable. I’ve never once clicked on an ad, nor know anyone that has.
wobbly
Off topic, but just when you think it can’t get any worse:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100615/ap_on_bi_ge/us_gulf_oil_spill_fire
I wonder if the President will incorporate this latest event into his speech tonight?
jl
Did Cole ever even try to teach Tunch how to speak LoLCat?
That’s my question about this scandal.
licensed to kill time
Go figure. If you’d told me back in the day when everybody and their brother was making/going to make a fortune on the Web that a site like this would be a winner, I’d have….been skeptical. I guess that explains why I’m not immensely rich by now. le sigh.
Alex S.
Animals and babies always win… I need to create a baby blog.
Quaker in a Basement
the possibility that Tunch is not pulling his weight
Psh. As if that much weight could be pulled.
Redshirt
Now that’s a business model!
Good for them. Anyone who can make a semi-honest buck from the internet has my respect.
me
What else from 4chan can be monetized?
jeffreyw
These need captions:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffreyww/4451445485/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffreyww/3851992651/in/set-72157622612597526/
TuiMel
I can haz a wicked virus that invaded my PC as a result of a visit to that site. Therefore, I can haz that site no more.
malraux
@me: ungodly amounts of pornography?
Gunner Billy K
@me:
Just wait and see. Makes me ill that everybody’s making money off it except the owner of the site and the people who actually make the content.
Farmer_Jones
I smell a big crash coming. how sustainable is a business like this?
me
@malraux: I’m fairly sure that niche has been filled many times over.
stuckinred
@jeffreyw: Chieu Hoi?
Lee from NC
@Quaker in a Basement:
And we have a winner!
Byfuglien (pronounced Bufflin)
@me: That’s what she said!
goatchowder
Proof that capitalism has completely detached from any measure of social utility or morals, and is over as an economic system.
Teachers? Fired, or getting pay cuts, or fuck you. Huckster who figures out how to make money off of other people’s work for free (the site readers do all the creative work), makes millions.
jeffreyw
@stuckinred: Everyone misses the mouse overhead.
fanshawe
@goatchowder:
Providing a clearinghouse has some value. Google bought Youtube for $1.65 billion. The owners of youtube weren’t the ones uploading videos.
steve
Well, no, i imagine unless his arms have been replaced by the two 2700-hp Alco diesel engines that drive the Nasa Crawler-Transporter, he’s prob’ly not.
maus
@Gunner Billy K: Sounds like eBaum.
Anyway, these guys are local and have a bad rep from paying their employees absolute crap and spouting out pseudolibertarian shit about how brilliant they are and how angry they get when people apply and expect more than WA minimum wage for all levels of the company’s operations.
http://gawker.com/5488509/inside-the-low+paying-cheezburger-empire
http://gawker.com/5486025/is-the-lolcat-empire-built-on-exploited-humans
Just as annoying are the kool-aid drinking fanboys who make what they see as valid defenses of the company but appear insane to anyone who isn’t a single mom with nothing else to do and/or living with their parents.
Essentially the dude pretends that his employees are working for a “dot com” and should not be paid a lot, however his employees get no investment in the company, no stock options, and work their butt off so they can play video games and drink beer on friday.
Uh, this is Seattle. You can do that at pretty much any other non-retail chain company around here. Or, you can even make enough to have friends! And go out to drink with them!
Joseph Nobles
Jesus Christ.
New high-end estimate of oil leaking in the Gulf – 60,000 barrels a day.
Martin
@jeffreyw: I can’t figure out how the mouse got overhead.
steve
go read about Amsterdam in the 1600’s. capitalism has always been like this.
PeakVT
Sounds like somebody (not me) should set up a lolcat site that promises to pay benefits to any employees and send all profits to rescue societies.
New Yorker
As much time as I waste at Balloon Juice, it’s not close to the amount of time I waste at Fail Blog, Failbooking, Autocomplete Me, and yes, Lolcats.
jeffreyw
@Martin:
The Amazing Toby refuses to divulge his method, other that to insist it is magic.
maus
@PeakVT: Yeah, though it really shouldn’t be hard to find a company that doesn’t use the snotty excuse that “our employees are more devoted and higher quality because we pay them less” and espouse Randroid “bootstraps” theology.
maus
@steve: icanhastulipz? :3
Bill Murray
@jeffreyw: dang educated rodents
terry chay
Those guys are pretty fun to hang out with.
Like this blog, all the Cheezburger blogs are run using WordPress software.
Currently, the entire network is hosted on WordPress.com as a VIP. (That’s also a full disclosure since I work at WordPress.com). Which means they don’t maintain the servers either. We do for them. They do the editorial work, start up the blogs, promote them, and they also write the books and sell stuff.
jeffreyw
@terry chay: Hey you! Fix our Blog! TaMara and I can’t get no satisfaction from you people. The slide shows are fucked up, dude. Here’s an example.
Chris Johnson
What else from 4chan can be monetized?
RAEP of course!
Have you never heard of Twilight? :D
arguingwithsignposts
@terry chay:
Well, I wouldn’t call slapping together a bunch of other people’s work “writing,” just like I won’t consider Sarah Palin the “author” of that new book of other people’s shit she’s pasting together with an Elmer’s Glue pot.
While I do embrace the remix culture, and the lolcat ethos, there has to come a point somewhere where some of the spoils go to the actual authors of all this lulz. Otherwise, it’s just another example of what the record labels did to all those great musicians from the past.
Cris
This is what Jeff Atwood calls “digital sharecropping.”
(with credit to Nicholas Carr)
maus
@arguingwithsignposts: Yeah, from what I remember about the book, they took the most popular macros and swapped the picture with one they had the rights to, only keeping the text. The original pictures were always funnier.
I wouldn’t be so grumpy about them if they weren’t so exploitative to the grunts :(