Building a Media Empire Around I Can Has Cheezburger

Ben Huh is the first to admit his company could easily have wound up on FAIL Blog. For the uninitiated, that’s his wildly popular website to which users submit photos and videos documenting such colossally stupid moves as writing a billboard partly in Braille and using a trash can as a bike helmet. Like the rest of the 20-odd websites Huh owns, FAIL Blog was added to his empire for no more specific reason, he says, than “Dude, I think it’s funny.”

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These spellbindingly inane blogs were built with the kind of user-generated content that has made Facebook and YouTube tremendously popular. But unlike these bigger sites, Huh’s company has been in the black since its first quarter. Pet Holdings managed to haul in seven figures from advertising, licensing fees and merchandise sales during the first six months of this year, according to a report given to Huh’s investors. His advertising model is low rent; 30% of ads go for premium prices of up to $8 per 1,000 page views. The rest can sell for as little as 15¢ — but legions of devoted followers pull in the necessary volume. In July, Huh’s sites attracted a total of 10.4 million unique visitors, many of whom logged on multiple times a day. His online success has even landed him speaking engagements in the venerable newsrooms of the Guardian and the New York Times. “There’s no way on the planet this should actually work,” Huh says of his business plan. “But it’s working.”

What’s working, exactly, is a series of viral humor sites intended simply “to make people happy for five minutes a day,” as Huh puts it. Huh, 31, a journalist turned dotcom entrepreneur, was born in South Korea and moved to California when he was in his teens. He launched Pet Holdings in 2007 when angel investors helped him buy a new website called I Can Has Cheezburger?, which is a compendium of “Lolcats,” laugh-out-loud feline photos captioned in “kitty pidgin,” or artfully misspelled imaginings of cats’ inner monologues. (The original Lolcat features a fat gray fur ball gazing longingly past the camera under the heading I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?) Huh discovered the site, which was started by two Hawaiian bloggers, when they linked to a photo on his personal blog. His site quickly buckled under the traffic, and he e-mailed to complain — then figured there was money to be made in such a zealous online community.

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His other offerings now include Probably Bad News, which catalogs news bloopers, like the headline CHILDREN COOK & SERVE GRANDPARENTS. GraphJam invites users to create statistical commentaries on pop culture, like a pie chart estimating the proportion of e-mails that come from “Friends,” “MySpace” or, the largest category, “People Who Want Me to Have a Bigger Penis.”

Speaking to the Times this year — and echoing what he told the Guardian staff and some 1,000 techies at the 2008 Future of Web Apps Expo in London — Huh said the key to making a site take off is connecting it to a cultural phenomenon. I Can Has Cheezburger?, for instance, pokes fun at an oft-maligned, inscrutable household pet, appealing to cat lovers and others. (Huh is allergic.) FAIL Blog has helped popularize fail as both a noun and an exclamation, not to mention an easier-to-spell synonym for schadenfreude. Another site, This is Photobomb, gives a name to otherwise perfectly good photos spoiled by an interloper — think streakers in the background of a wedding shot. “Everybody has seen it. Nobody knew what to call it,” says Huh.

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“The moment you see something like a Photobomb happen, we want you to think of our site,” he says. And people do: only a quarter of his users find their way to Huh’s blogs through miscellaneous links or social-networking sites such as StumbleUpon and Facebook. The other 75% head directly to his sites, either typing in the URLs or searching for them via Google.

More than anything else, Huh seems to have a knack for nailing the zeitgeist. Any of his sites, after all, could easily have become yet another passing online craze. (Remember the Numa Numa Guy?) Pet Holdings’ page views, however, are growing at an annual clip of 300%. Huh admits some sites fall flat: “There’s stuff you will never even hear about because it sucks so bad.” For example, My Wedding is a Big Deal!, an assortment of bridal fails, Photobombs and other snafus, didn’t quite gel. Another contender, called That’s So Racist — for posting public examples of unintentional racism — was deemed a nonstarter. “We decided to pass on it because the comments would probably just descend into trolling and negativity,” Huh says.

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But on the whole, Pet Holdings shows no sign of losing steam. Just the opposite, in fact: the sites are making inroads off-line. A Cheezburger-inspired book spent 13 weeks on the New York Times paperback best-seller list last winter, and three follow-up titles are on their way this fall. FAIL Blog ink stampers and Lolcats magnetic poetry sell like hotcakes. Contributors to the LOLCat Bible Translation Project, which launched in 2007, are almost through translating the entire Good Book into kitty pidgin. (It opens, “Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs.”) I Can Has Cheezburger: The MusicLOL! is scheduled to debut Aug. 14 at the New York International Fringe Festival. The show follows several cats and a “Lolrus” in search of a particular food. “It’s a classic quest arc,” says co-writer Kristyn Pomranz. “We really wanted to explore this holy grail that is a cheeseburger.”

So what’s the secret of Huh’s success? Part of the charm of his sites is that they appear to be put together by rank amateurs. “It’s on purpose,” says Huh. Actually, they’re carefully cultivated by 20 staffers, mostly Seattle-based, including a lapsed lawyer and a former investment banker. The company is hiring roughly one staffer a month and gets some 100 applications for every position. Applicants should not offend easily and must have held a job they hated, says Huh, to better appreciate the joys of spending their days perusing funny photos. Plus, he says, “we want them to have spent serious time goofing off on the Internet.”

The staffers who sift through the 10,000 photos and videos that users submit each day never write their own jokes or even edit users’ captions; they simply cull the best offerings. If something is funny but is a questionable fit for an existing site, they’ll start a new one. FAIL Blog, for instance, spawned There, I Fixed It, a catalog of such misguided repair jobs as an airplane apparently patched together with duct tape. They’re always searching for new memes — jokes or fads that could slip into the virtual jet stream and spread.

Huh, who works in a windowless 8-by-8-ft. server closet, like a Web Wizard of Oz (“It gets really hot with the door shut, so meetings have to be short,” he says), admits he knows what he’s looking for only when he sees it. “You can’t really explain why it’s funny,” he says. “That’s part of the fun.”

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