7 ms·

How I Can Has Cheezburger became a web empire

52 points by jlangenauer 16y ago

alttab 16y ago
Amazing to hear the numbers. I'll file this one under ifart and question my career again. I can has breakdown.
- joezydeco 16y ago
  iFart? My category is called "We Think Too Hard"
- fierarul 16y ago
  >Cheezburger now has more than 40 employees and has not sought additional investment. [Teal'c voice]: Indeed.
- FlemishBeeCycle 16y ago
  It makes sense though. You're essentially allowing your user-base to feed itself - they generate the content and then consume the content. Nobody knows what the audience wants better than the audience themselves.
- MartinCron 16y ago
  I'm not exactly an objective observer (I'm one of the ~40 that works for Cheezburger) but I think the comparison to ifart is a little unfair. It's not all Lolcats, you know. Take a look through the >50 sites and if you can't find something that makes you laugh, you should see your doctor. Seriously http://cheezburger.com/sites/ http://cheezburger.com/sites/
  - psyklic 16y ago
    It is iFart, you just diversify your comedy portfolio!
- chime 16y ago
  Creativity comes in all flavors. Someone creates a Jump-to-Conclusion mat and makes a million while someone spends their entire life working on elliptic curves to improve cryptography. Get-rich-quick stories entice even the most brilliant of the minds and we're no different. A story about some kid making $35k/month from a stupid app for iPhone makes people wonder why they even bother learning Clojure or spending hours improving their writing skills. The truth is, you must ask yourself what will make you truly happy - being the developer of a gimmick app that made money or someone who has directly contributed to the world with their efforts. Upon hearing the above, many have said "well, once you have lots of money, say like the reddit guys, you can spend your time doing what you love and help the world." No. The reddit guys WERE doing what they loved and would have done what they're now doing regardless of the money. Sure, having money like Elon Musk helps but then again, it may not. If you hate your career now, get the ball rolling to change it. If you are happy with it, who cares if someone else made millions sharing pictures of cats? I mean do you feel bad that someone in India made $10m selling a special type of plastic sheet to farmers? Or someone in South Africa made millions selling vuvuzelas? If your ultimate goal is to make money, then certainly wonder if you chose the right career. Money laundering or even investment banking might be a better path. Otherwise, realize the money is just a serendipitous by-product of any venture.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    "Or someone in South Africa made millions selling vuvuzelas?" If I ever find that guy, he's in for a world of pain.
    - Luc 16y ago
      The Vuvuzela (TM) maker was once a small startup that won an entrepreneurship competition and got help from an incubator: http://www.fin24.com/Companies/SAB-moves-to-protect-vuvuzela-20040519 http://www.fin24.com/Companies/SAB-moves-to-protect-vuvuzela... I have mixed emotions about this one, for sure.
  - starkfist 16y ago
    The money made by icanhazcheezburger was not "the serendipitous by-product of any venture". A guy bought the site from someone else with the intention of making money off of it. Getting rich selling plastic sheets to indian farmers does not bother most hackers because it's completely outside of their domain. Building a website or iFart app is not.
- alttab 16y ago
  Wow... a lot of responses. I guess I forgot the "</sarcasm>". All great points though, nothing I don't already agree with.
mynameishere 16y ago
If the comment section on icanhascheeseburger doesn't drive you to suicide, you're probably safe keeping that 45 in your house.
- Daniel_Newby 16y ago
  I'd forgotten about the comments. Blocked them out, really.
thunk 16y ago
Well, that and toxoplasmosis.
MartinCron 16y ago
In a move that isn't at all shocking, the NY Times reporter didn't have much interest in talking with me or any of the other Cheezburger Network developers when she was in our office a few weeks ago. If anyone is curious about the technical side of what we do and how we do it, I'll gladly answer questions here. Also, we're looking for software developers. We're in Seattle, and have a strong bias for local talent, but we have a bunch of remote deveopers. Of the dozen or so companies I've worked for, Cheezburger is hands down the best. Srsly. Email martin@cheezburger.com if you're interested.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- iamjustlooking 16y ago
  I'm sure from a reporter perspective it doesn't appear like there's much of a technical side to what appears to be a wordpress blog with cats on it.
  - MartinCron 16y ago
    That's why I would expect a reporter to, when introduced to a bunch of technical people to ask, "what? there's a technical side?" Then we could talk about how we make systems to help the editorial team sort through the 16,000 content submissions we get every day, or how we have a public API so people can submit funny content from their applications. The "wordpress blog with cats on it" is a very shallow view of the company. There's a lot more going on than that.
    - iamjustlooking 16y ago
      Are you referring to the lolcat derivative websites you guys have or is there something big going on behind the scenes?
      - MartinCron 16y ago
        A little of both, there's the constantly evolving system that powers ICHC and the ~50 other sites (not exactly lolcat derivative...the content is pretty diverse) as well as the growing niche social network on cheezburger.com. One big thing that we're trying to do is make the users' profile pages more of a destination in themselves, where your account on cheezburger is where you express your sense of humor to the world and consume aggregated funny stuff from the people you care about. A lot of people (myself included) use multiple social networks/online communities for different things. Personal example: Flickr is for my "serious" photos, I use tweetphoto for cameraphone snapshots and bestc.am for more artistic cameraphone creations. Picture using Twitter for current friends and celebrities, Facebook for family and old high-school friends, and Cheezburger for your online humor friends. Naturally there's overlap (we support sharing your funny stuff on Facebook and Twitter) but we already have a growing number of people who use our (very simple) systems for friending and messaging.
ck2 16y ago
Step 1: Take content from everyone and everywhere else and put it on your own site.
- jessriedel 16y ago
  More like, come up with a great web-interface to allow a single, one-time idea from an individual user (which otherwise would have been heard only by him and his friends) to be made available to the entire internet.
mikeleeorg 16y ago
I'm a little surprised that no one's caught on to the real business model behind Cheezburger Network. What they're doing is pretty clever. It's more than just a bunch of silly captions under photos of cats. They're building a system that capitalizes on Internet memes that can be presented in a blog-like fashion.[1] That, to me, is a mark of a potentially sustainable business model. To break it down in more detail: a) They monitor Internet memes b) They evaluate which ones are worthy of a trial run c) They launch a site around it d) They assess that site's success (using whatever metrics they've discovered are important, such as PVs and unique visitors for advertisers) e) They pull the plug if the trial is not successful It's not a new business model, but it's a clever one that's obviously working. I'm particularly impressed that they're aiming to launch a site every week, and kill only 20% of those experiments. I wonder if that number is low. That's why they're more than just a WordPress blog with cats on it. [1] The similarities to a blog are probably incidental. I imagine they basically want a way to display recent user-generated entries and allow other users to comment on them. A blogging system naturally satisfies these attributes. Otherwise, I don't think they necessarily need their sites to look like blogs, per se.
- medianama 16y ago
  Could you elaborate this further? Just want to understand this better
  - mikeleeorg 16y ago
    Sure. MartinCron may be able to answer this question better than I can, but I'll give you my outsider's perspective. I think it starts with the assumption that people enjoy sites that make them laugh. We all need a break from our hectic days for a few smiles. That's why sites like The Onion, FML, Stuff White People Like, etc have thrived. They have hilarious content that's updated often and draws people back again & again. Advertisers love being any place there are masses of people - particularly a place that can matches their target demographics and fits their brand. Right there, you could have a fair business. Funny content + advertisers. But to make this business scalable, you need a lot of content. Writing content is difficult and expensive. You would have to hire a lot of comedy writers (a la College Humor) to constantly pump out great stuff. It's not impossible, obviously, but for every College Humor there are dozens of failed sites who just weren't funny enough. There's a better way though. If you can encourage your audience to generate the content, you'll have a cost-effective (read: low-margin) way of creating great content, plus you'll get the audience involved and make them feel like part of the community. It's very satisfying to see your cat with your funny caption on icanhascheezburger.com. That's the kind of thing that can make you a long-term fan and repeat contributor. To take this one step further, have the audience rate which pieces of user-generated content is good enough to be featured on the site. This is similar to the Threadless model. You don't need to actively pick the best pieces of content, you just let your audience do it for you. And your audience is probably the best judge of what they think is funny or not. It's crowd-sourcing at its best. Now you have: (user generated content + user ratings = funny content) + advertisers What's especially insightful is that Cheezburger Network took this another step further. They built a platform that allowed them to replicate this formula across various "humor niches," if you will. As MartinCron said, it's more than just Internet memes, it's any crowd-source-able humor. The platform itself is what I alluded to in my previous comment. It allows them to cost-effectively launch new sites after they've analyzed new potential humor niches. They don't even have to be comedic geniuses (though with a failure rate of 20%, perhaps they are), they just have to launch lots of sites, then kill the ones that fail. This Darwinian approach will leave them with only high-quality content. MartinCron didn't mention this in his description of the technology, but I imagine they also need an advertising system of some sort. Advertisers on icanhascheezburger.com may not want to advertise on ihasahotdog.com, for instance. Their ad system would have to be able to manage their ad inventory. So here's what we have so far: (user generated content + user ratings = funny content) + (advertisers + managed ads) And this is being replicated over & over again by their platform. I focus a lot on their platform because I believe that is what makes their business scalable. You could try building individual instances of such sites over & over again yourself, but it would take quite a bit of time. Automation is key to a scalable business. On top of all this, it sounds like they're now adding a basic social network to further increase a user's involvement on the site. That will surely encourage current power users to become even more loyal. And the ability to share content on social media services will aid them with marketing reach. All smart moves towards scaling their business even further. I hope that answers your question, medianama. A little long-winded perhaps, but I think I've covered most of the major points, as I see it. I'm sure others can elaborate even further.
seanalltogether 16y ago
To me the cheezburger network is like the paparazzi of internet culture. Chasing down memes and raping them in front of thousands of viewers to provide a flash of cynical entertainment before moving on.
- px 16y ago
  Trivializes rape a little bit, doesn't it?

52 points by jlangenauer 16y ago

alttab 16y ago

Amazing to hear the numbers. I'll file this one under ifart and question my career again. I can has breakdown.

joezydeco 16y ago
iFart? My category is called "We Think Too Hard"
fierarul 16y ago
>Cheezburger now has more than 40 employees and has not sought additional investment. [Teal'c voice]: Indeed.
FlemishBeeCycle 16y ago
It makes sense though. You're essentially allowing your user-base to feed itself - they generate the content and then consume the content. Nobody knows what the audience wants better than the audience themselves.
MartinCron 16y ago
I'm not exactly an objective observer (I'm one of the ~40 that works for Cheezburger) but I think the comparison to ifart is a little unfair. It's not all Lolcats, you know. Take a look through the >50 sites and if you can't find something that makes you laugh, you should see your doctor. Seriously http://cheezburger.com/sites/ http://cheezburger.com/sites/
- psyklic 16y ago
  It is iFart, you just diversify your comedy portfolio!
chime 16y ago
Creativity comes in all flavors. Someone creates a Jump-to-Conclusion mat and makes a million while someone spends their entire life working on elliptic curves to improve cryptography. Get-rich-quick stories entice even the most brilliant of the minds and we're no different. A story about some kid making $35k/month from a stupid app for iPhone makes people wonder why they even bother learning Clojure or spending hours improving their writing skills. The truth is, you must ask yourself what will make you truly happy - being the developer of a gimmick app that made money or someone who has directly contributed to the world with their efforts. Upon hearing the above, many have said "well, once you have lots of money, say like the reddit guys, you can spend your time doing what you love and help the world." No. The reddit guys WERE doing what they loved and would have done what they're now doing regardless of the money. Sure, having money like Elon Musk helps but then again, it may not. If you hate your career now, get the ball rolling to change it. If you are happy with it, who cares if someone else made millions sharing pictures of cats? I mean do you feel bad that someone in India made $10m selling a special type of plastic sheet to farmers? Or someone in South Africa made millions selling vuvuzelas? If your ultimate goal is to make money, then certainly wonder if you chose the right career. Money laundering or even investment banking might be a better path. Otherwise, realize the money is just a serendipitous by-product of any venture.
- roel_v 16y ago
  "Or someone in South Africa made millions selling vuvuzelas?" If I ever find that guy, he's in for a world of pain.
  - Luc 16y ago
    The Vuvuzela (TM) maker was once a small startup that won an entrepreneurship competition and got help from an incubator: http://www.fin24.com/Companies/SAB-moves-to-protect-vuvuzela-20040519 http://www.fin24.com/Companies/SAB-moves-to-protect-vuvuzela... I have mixed emotions about this one, for sure.
- starkfist 16y ago
  The money made by icanhazcheezburger was not "the serendipitous by-product of any venture". A guy bought the site from someone else with the intention of making money off of it. Getting rich selling plastic sheets to indian farmers does not bother most hackers because it's completely outside of their domain. Building a website or iFart app is not.
alttab 16y ago
Wow... a lot of responses. I guess I forgot the "</sarcasm>". All great points though, nothing I don't already agree with.

mynameishere 16y ago

If the comment section on icanhascheeseburger doesn't drive you to suicide, you're probably safe keeping that 45 in your house.

Daniel_Newby 16y ago
I'd forgotten about the comments. Blocked them out, really.

thunk 16y ago

Well, that and toxoplasmosis.

MartinCron 16y ago

In a move that isn't at all shocking, the NY Times reporter didn't have much interest in talking with me or any of the other Cheezburger Network developers when she was in our office a few weeks ago. If anyone is curious about the technical side of what we do and how we do it, I'll gladly answer questions here. Also, we're looking for software developers. We're in Seattle, and have a strong bias for local talent, but we have a bunch of remote deveopers. Of the dozen or so companies I've worked for, Cheezburger is hands down the best. Srsly. Email martin@cheezburger.com if you're interested.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
iamjustlooking 16y ago
I'm sure from a reporter perspective it doesn't appear like there's much of a technical side to what appears to be a wordpress blog with cats on it.
- MartinCron 16y ago
  That's why I would expect a reporter to, when introduced to a bunch of technical people to ask, "what? there's a technical side?" Then we could talk about how we make systems to help the editorial team sort through the 16,000 content submissions we get every day, or how we have a public API so people can submit funny content from their applications. The "wordpress blog with cats on it" is a very shallow view of the company. There's a lot more going on than that.
  - iamjustlooking 16y ago
    Are you referring to the lolcat derivative websites you guys have or is there something big going on behind the scenes?
    - MartinCron 16y ago
      A little of both, there's the constantly evolving system that powers ICHC and the ~50 other sites (not exactly lolcat derivative...the content is pretty diverse) as well as the growing niche social network on cheezburger.com. One big thing that we're trying to do is make the users' profile pages more of a destination in themselves, where your account on cheezburger is where you express your sense of humor to the world and consume aggregated funny stuff from the people you care about. A lot of people (myself included) use multiple social networks/online communities for different things. Personal example: Flickr is for my "serious" photos, I use tweetphoto for cameraphone snapshots and bestc.am for more artistic cameraphone creations. Picture using Twitter for current friends and celebrities, Facebook for family and old high-school friends, and Cheezburger for your online humor friends. Naturally there's overlap (we support sharing your funny stuff on Facebook and Twitter) but we already have a growing number of people who use our (very simple) systems for friending and messaging.

ck2 16y ago

Step 1: Take content from everyone and everywhere else and put it on your own site.

jessriedel 16y ago
More like, come up with a great web-interface to allow a single, one-time idea from an individual user (which otherwise would have been heard only by him and his friends) to be made available to the entire internet.

mikeleeorg 16y ago

I'm a little surprised that no one's caught on to the real business model behind Cheezburger Network. What they're doing is pretty clever. It's more than just a bunch of silly captions under photos of cats. They're building a system that capitalizes on Internet memes that can be presented in a blog-like fashion.[1] That, to me, is a mark of a potentially sustainable business model. To break it down in more detail: a) They monitor Internet memes b) They evaluate which ones are worthy of a trial run c) They launch a site around it d) They assess that site's success (using whatever metrics they've discovered are important, such as PVs and unique visitors for advertisers) e) They pull the plug if the trial is not successful It's not a new business model, but it's a clever one that's obviously working. I'm particularly impressed that they're aiming to launch a site every week, and kill only 20% of those experiments. I wonder if that number is low. That's why they're more than just a WordPress blog with cats on it. [1] The similarities to a blog are probably incidental. I imagine they basically want a way to display recent user-generated entries and allow other users to comment on them. A blogging system naturally satisfies these attributes. Otherwise, I don't think they necessarily need their sites to look like blogs, per se.

medianama 16y ago
Could you elaborate this further? Just want to understand this better
- mikeleeorg 16y ago
  Sure. MartinCron may be able to answer this question better than I can, but I'll give you my outsider's perspective. I think it starts with the assumption that people enjoy sites that make them laugh. We all need a break from our hectic days for a few smiles. That's why sites like The Onion, FML, Stuff White People Like, etc have thrived. They have hilarious content that's updated often and draws people back again & again. Advertisers love being any place there are masses of people - particularly a place that can matches their target demographics and fits their brand. Right there, you could have a fair business. Funny content + advertisers. But to make this business scalable, you need a lot of content. Writing content is difficult and expensive. You would have to hire a lot of comedy writers (a la College Humor) to constantly pump out great stuff. It's not impossible, obviously, but for every College Humor there are dozens of failed sites who just weren't funny enough. There's a better way though. If you can encourage your audience to generate the content, you'll have a cost-effective (read: low-margin) way of creating great content, plus you'll get the audience involved and make them feel like part of the community. It's very satisfying to see your cat with your funny caption on icanhascheezburger.com. That's the kind of thing that can make you a long-term fan and repeat contributor. To take this one step further, have the audience rate which pieces of user-generated content is good enough to be featured on the site. This is similar to the Threadless model. You don't need to actively pick the best pieces of content, you just let your audience do it for you. And your audience is probably the best judge of what they think is funny or not. It's crowd-sourcing at its best. Now you have: (user generated content + user ratings = funny content) + advertisers What's especially insightful is that Cheezburger Network took this another step further. They built a platform that allowed them to replicate this formula across various "humor niches," if you will. As MartinCron said, it's more than just Internet memes, it's any crowd-source-able humor. The platform itself is what I alluded to in my previous comment. It allows them to cost-effectively launch new sites after they've analyzed new potential humor niches. They don't even have to be comedic geniuses (though with a failure rate of 20%, perhaps they are), they just have to launch lots of sites, then kill the ones that fail. This Darwinian approach will leave them with only high-quality content. MartinCron didn't mention this in his description of the technology, but I imagine they also need an advertising system of some sort. Advertisers on icanhascheezburger.com may not want to advertise on ihasahotdog.com, for instance. Their ad system would have to be able to manage their ad inventory. So here's what we have so far: (user generated content + user ratings = funny content) + (advertisers + managed ads) And this is being replicated over & over again by their platform. I focus a lot on their platform because I believe that is what makes their business scalable. You could try building individual instances of such sites over & over again yourself, but it would take quite a bit of time. Automation is key to a scalable business. On top of all this, it sounds like they're now adding a basic social network to further increase a user's involvement on the site. That will surely encourage current power users to become even more loyal. And the ability to share content on social media services will aid them with marketing reach. All smart moves towards scaling their business even further. I hope that answers your question, medianama. A little long-winded perhaps, but I think I've covered most of the major points, as I see it. I'm sure others can elaborate even further.

seanalltogether 16y ago

To me the cheezburger network is like the paparazzi of internet culture. Chasing down memes and raping them in front of thousands of viewers to provide a flash of cynical entertainment before moving on.

px 16y ago
Trivializes rape a little bit, doesn't it?