The making of the Cheezburger empire
So how did a site with pictures of cats and misspelled captions become a web empire that “will generate a seven-figure sum from advertising, licensing fees and merchandise sales”? I’m not entirely sure. But what I am sure of is that I read The New York Times’ story about I Can Haz Cheezburger twice hoping to discover the secret.
I didn’t learn the secret but I learned that the site has spawned a network of fifty-three other sites, including Fail Blog and There I Fixed it, employs forty people, and garners some 16 million unique visitors a month. The most mind-boggling? The content is all reader generated. The Cheezburger employees act as editors deciding what is and is not funny, while keeping an eye out for trends worthy of a new site.
This is one of those articles that could make you feel a little bitter wondering, why didn’t I think of that or it could just make you laugh and love the Internet just a little bit more. Personally, I save my bitterness for blogs with book deals, which, yes, includes Cheezburger. . . but come on, who buys these books?
