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I Can Has Funding: Cheezburger Raises $30M
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- rdl 16y agoPlease please please do not pop before the end of 2011!
- patrickaljord 16y agoWhy is this a bubble if they are already profitable?
- foljs 16y agoEmm, he says "There are a lot of reasons to believe we're in another startup bubble [period]" in GENERAL, not that ICHC specifically is an example of that. In fact, he implies, ICHC is NOT an example of that, since it is profitable.
- robotys 16y agoAnd what will they do with the money? hire more lolcats?
- gcb 16y agomaybe some cheeseburgers
- davidmurphy 16y agoImport In-n-Out shipments to Seattle daily?
- gcb 16y agomaybe they are working on the secret animal version of the site
- wiradikusuma 16y agoI love your country
- rhizome 16y agoSaturday morning cartoon.
- rhizome 16y agoI don't usually complain about downvotes, but this time? They're going to have to expand horizontally to get past hot-or-not vitality, though I suppose they could just be planning growth based on discovering more cute-able animals.
- Andrenid 16y agoHate to be another "Bubble" preacher, but if this isn't another step in that direction, I don't know what is.
- hugh3 16y agoWell, there's two ways to look at this. Are we buying Cheezburger Network because of its existing collection of fad-sites, or are we buying it because we think they have the capacity to keep coming up with new fad-meme-sites indefinitely?
- latch 16y agoBubble? Don't know. I bet they attract very distinct (relative to most websites) and important segments. If I took at stab at it I'd say something like non-tech white employed females. If they do have unique and/or focused segments, and enough of them, they can monetize it.
- sidek 16y agoFailblog is popular with some high school students.
- latch 16y agoYa, I wasn't thinking Failblog was popular amongst the employed-female crowd. Different property, different segment. As long as you have and can identify a specific audience, you're in good shape. It'd be interesting to get a breakdown lolcat's audience...maybe i'm wrong and it's a broad group which doesn't differentiate itself from a lot of web properties (male geeks).
- JacobAldridge 16y agoYeah, for what it's worth I tend to check out a few of their properties most days. I stopped with the lolcats when the ironic crowd were overrun with the 'oh-it's-a-cute-kittie' crowd, but I still check out Fail Blog, Ugliest Tattoos, and Failbook. I think you're right that focused segments is the key to the growth and success so far. http://failblog.org/ http://failblog.org/ http://ugliesttattoos.com/ http://ugliesttattoos.com/ http://failbook.com/ http://failbook.com/
- reynolds 16y agoThere are a lot of reasons to believe we're in another startup bubble, but at least Cheezburger is profitable.
- plnewman 16y agoI've never looked at this site before today. What's the point of it?
- shankx 16y agoDo cats get a share of that funding?
- mahmud 16y agoThat, my friends, is why I wash my hands of this industry. So much for "smart people doing what they love" eh? Better get that government job and hunker down; once this pops, your mad skillz might never see use again. For those lacking historical context; it took 20 years for anyone to be hired in industry to work in "artificial intelligence".
- snprbob86 16y agoHaving met several people who work at Cheezburger, I can verify that they are indeed very smart people doing what they love. The Cheezburger team works tirelessly to make sure that their users laugh, every day. That's their mission and they seem to be achieving it...
- mahmud 16y agoSmart people, maybe, but they sure as hell don't need to be working hard to keep ICHCB running. As far as technologies that inspire go, there are very, VERY few around.
- ryanwaggoner 16y agoJust think, if it's so easy, there's a HUGE opportunity for you to swoop in, solo of course, and build a profitable (from inception) company with 375 million monthly pageviews and 100 million monthly video views. And since you can run it all by yourself, think of the money you'll save! Ah, but you're not "inspired" by that kind of thing. Too bad, you could be rolling in cash. EDIT: Yes, I'm being snarky. It pisses me off to see some random person on the Internet tear down the accomplishments of a team that has built something huge and profitable that their users love. From scratch. In three years. What experience do you have running a network of the size and scope of theirs that leads you to denigrate their work?
- mahmud 16y agoI would rather take the Stephen Wolfram path to "rolling in cash", thank you very much.
- ryanwaggoner 16y agoHow the hell can you all be bitching about how this is a bubble? Were any of you around for the dot com days? I was young, but I remember companies getting triple and quadruple digit P/E ratios, for the lucky ones that had earnings at all. Others went public and were worth hundreds of millions or billions before they had so much as a decent audience, let alone a revenue model. Now we're crying "bubble" because a profitable company with a huge (profitable) audience raised money to grow even more profitable? You think their subject is stupid, I get it. You probably don't watch cheap, cookie-cutter cartoons or read trashy romance novels, but there are huge markets for those, too. If growing, profitable companies in large markets raising capital means a bubble, may it grow ever more bubbly.
- latch 16y agoI did an internship at a place in 99...I never saw a product or a client..but I saw fancy offices and foosball tables. It set certain ..ahh...unrealistic expectations.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- brc 16y agoThat must have sucked going into a downhill ride in both work and office expectations. I imagine within three years you were working in some crappy location jammed with developers. I was lucky. I started work in a major recession after 12 months of searching. Every year was an improvement in both salary, conditions and offices. By the time the bubble came and went I'd seen it all anyway. Still, good times. I remember having a golf putter beside my desk and engaging in golf competitions with senior management. And my coworkers writing cool multiplayer games instead of actually, you know, writing code that paid bills. Oh there was deadlines and projects and stuff like that. Another one of my friends was having visa troubles, and had to produce evidence of employment. All he had was a couple of employement documents on a letterhead of a company that didn't exist anymore, and the domain name went to some crazy domain parking company. The INS people were skeptical to say the least when he tried to explain what they did.
- 16y ago
- revorad 16y agoAny ideas on how much revenue/profit they make?
- redthrowaway 16y agoQuite a bit. Ben Huh is worth many millions, and that's from merchandizing and advertising, not raising capital. It's a very profitable business, considering it's just 3 year old 4chan memes, and a bunch of newer ones that are nowhere near funny.
- revorad 16y agoAny numbers or sources?
- redthrowaway 16y agoOnly circumstantial and hearsay, but I do know Huh made a serious pitch to buy reddit last year. He owns some 40 sites [1], many of which are small, but quite a few of which are reasonably large and well-capitalized (failblog, ICHC, Very Demotivational, there I fixed it, etc). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Holdings_Inc.#Websites http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Holdings_Inc.#Websites
- steveplace 16y agoJust like facebook, twitter, zynga, and groupon... The fact that this news pisses off HN commenters leads me to believe that they will be fairly successful.