Thread: SUCCESS STORY: I Can CheeZ!

King of Cheez: The Internet’s Meme Maestro Turns Junk Into Gold | Magazine
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What most people view as a workday time-suck, Huh sees as a potential gold mine. And so far, he’s been right. Back in September 2007, when most tech players were pouring VC money into the next Facebook, Huh hooked up with a group of angel investors to buy his first fledgling phenomenon, the I Can Has Cheezburger? blog. Since then, he has built Cheezburger Network into the largest aggregator of Web memes, pulling in more than 200 million pageviews a month combined. Huh won’t divulge financial specifics, but investor documents show the Cheezburger Network approached $4 million in revenue last year. The money comes from display ads (companies like American Express and Burger King sponsor the sites) as well as books (the lolcat series has produced two New York Times best-sellers), T-shirts, and other merch. “In the past year and a half, a meme industry has come into place,” says Tim Hwang, organizer of ROFLcon, a biannual Web-celebrity gathering. “There are people who are interested in commercializing memes. Ben’s accelerating that development. Suddenly, everybody’s like, ‘Wow, you can actually pursue this for a living.’”

I wouldn't be shocked to see 50% margins in this since content is user generated.

Good lesson, he doesn't reinvent the wheel. Everything has been out there awhile in some variation.

"The tactics that Huh uses to beat out the other meme-jockeying Web sites can be a little obnoxious. Consider the case of Engrish.com. Last year, Huh tried to acquire the long-running botched-translation site, but when he and the owner couldn’t agree to terms, Huh simply set up his own site, Engrish Funny. “We’ll launch a Web site and people will be like, ‘You’re copying these guys!’” Huh says. “But they’re copying these guys, and the guys before that were copying these guys. Everything we do is some variation on the past.”

Huh has a point. The Cheezburger sites are recycling decades-old comedic constructs. The celebrity-doppelgänger site Totally Looks Like is a riff on Spy magazine’s Separated at Birth? franchise. FAIL Blog, meanwhile, has co-opted America’s Funniest Home Videos and National Lampoon’s True Facts section."