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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

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.
MartinCron 16y ago
I think a lot of people (including yourself) have caught on to the business model. It's just that many people can't get past the WTF factor of the funny cat site to see that there's a serious business there. Nobody is keeping what we're doing a secret. It's not just "Internet memes" though, it's more about finding untapped types of crowd-source-able humor. There wasn't a popular "there, I fixed it" meme before we launched thereifixedit.com I haven't been keeping explicit score, but the killing 20% figure feels about right. Our count of surviving sites has been constantly growing, we're up to 53 at the moment.
- mikeleeorg 16y ago
  Ah yes, crowd-source-able humor! Now I'm even more impressed. 53 sites is a lot. Do you have people that oversee the content & comments on those sites? FYI for anyone else who is curious like I am about what those 53 sites might be: http://cheezburger.com/sites http://cheezburger.com/sites
  - MartinCron 16y ago
    Yes. We have a lot of people overseeing content and comments, it's most of our staff. Each person generally does between 4 and 6 sites, with the sites generally posting between 1 and 6 items to the front page (featured content) daily. For each thing you see on any front page, there are dozens of things that didn't make it through voting, and for each of those things on the voting pages, there are dozens of things that weren't good enough for voting. We're able to crowdsource the generation/submission of content as well as (some of) the curation of content. A lot of what makes a site work is finding the right balance between editorial vision and letting users vote on what they like.

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.

MartinCron 16y ago

I think a lot of people (including yourself) have caught on to the business model. It's just that many people can't get past the WTF factor of the funny cat site to see that there's a serious business there. Nobody is keeping what we're doing a secret. It's not just "Internet memes" though, it's more about finding untapped types of crowd-source-able humor. There wasn't a popular "there, I fixed it" meme before we launched thereifixedit.com I haven't been keeping explicit score, but the killing 20% figure feels about right. Our count of surviving sites has been constantly growing, we're up to 53 at the moment.

mikeleeorg 16y ago
Ah yes, crowd-source-able humor! Now I'm even more impressed. 53 sites is a lot. Do you have people that oversee the content & comments on those sites? FYI for anyone else who is curious like I am about what those 53 sites might be: http://cheezburger.com/sites http://cheezburger.com/sites
- MartinCron 16y ago
  Yes. We have a lot of people overseeing content and comments, it's most of our staff. Each person generally does between 4 and 6 sites, with the sites generally posting between 1 and 6 items to the front page (featured content) daily. For each thing you see on any front page, there are dozens of things that didn't make it through voting, and for each of those things on the voting pages, there are dozens of things that weren't good enough for voting. We're able to crowdsource the generation/submission of content as well as (some of) the curation of content. A lot of what makes a site work is finding the right balance between editorial vision and letting users vote on what they like.