King of Cheez: The Internet’s Meme Maestro Turns Junk Into Gold

What most people view as a workday time-suck, Ben Huh sees as a potential gold mine.
Photo: Misha Gravenor

Just how funny is a beer-drinking horse? Ben Huh is sitting in his downtown Seattle office asking himself this question. It’s an unseasonably warm afternoon in November, and Huh, the 32-year-old founder of the humor-blog startup Cheezburger Network, is deciding whether a picture of a boozy equine chugging a cold one should run on Daily Squee, a Web site devoted entirely to user-generated snapshots of twee creatures.

The problem with drunken farm animals, though, is that they’re never quite as cute as you’d hope. “This is kind of close to animal abuse,” Huh says, pivoting in his chair in mild disgust. He’s dressed in dark blue jeans, cream-colored Warhol-replica eyeglasses, and a red T-shirt featuring a freakishly long-torsoed kitty — a nod to lolcats, one of the many Web phenomena Huh has made mainstream.
He turns to Kiki Kane, who manages new site development at Cheezburger. “A horse drinking beer is not Daily Squee,” Huh determines.

He and Kane then half-jokingly brainstorm some possible new sites that might run this somewhat unsavory image: WTFnature.com? Naturedoingitsownthing.com? The conversation quickly moves on to the recent influx of user-generated dog-humping pictures. “People submit 500 pictures of dogs humping every day!” Kane says. “There’s got to be a place for those.”

“There is,” Huh replies. “But it’s not with us.” As he later explains: “We’ve done this enough times to know that’s just a one-note joke.”

Source: Nielsen

For almost three years now, this has been Huh’s life: to pore over millions of JPEGs and YouTube clips in search of Internet memes — those absurd running gags that hatch and proliferate on the Web seemingly overnight — and figure out which of these quick-hit laughs might yield long-term profits. Since it launched, the Cheezburger Network has successfully aggregated more than 30 sites. You’ve likely visited a few of them, perhaps at the behest of an easily distracted coworker or a walrus-loving aunt. There’s Huh’s flagship site, I Can Has Cheezburger?, a vast repository of lolcat images (for the uninitiated, these are cat pictures with absurd, syntactically challenged captions). There’s GraphJam, a data-visualization blog that renders witty pop-culture musings into pie charts, Venn diagrams, and illustrated maps. The aptly named FAIL Blog — the Cheezburger Network’s most popular site, with 1.1 million visitors per month in the US — runs a seemingly infinite number of skateboard spills, nut-smacks, and hilariously misspelled signs.

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.’”

Of course, Huh can’t take all of the credit for Cheezburger’s success. In fact, he owes quite a bit to the millions of anonymous Web dwellers whose work he corrals, curates, and posts. The majority of Cheezburger’s sites are, after all, extensions of ideas born on ungoverned image-board sites like 4chan or Something Awful — inside jokes that bubble up, JPEG by JPEG, into the mainstream. Lolcats, for example, are an offshoot of Caturday, a 4chan chestnut that dates back to at least 2005. FAIL is a long-running Web gag traceable to Blazing Star, a 1998 Japanese videogame that taunts players with onscreen messages like “You fail it!” Other sites, like GraphJam or the subversive motivational posters of Very Demotivational, were rough concepts until Huh figured out how to develop and package them.

Huh’s setup encourages users to submit their own lolcats or FAIL entries, ensuring a continuous supply of content. “I used to want to create memes more,” he says. “But what’s more satisfying: playing on the playground or building a playground for a bunch of people to enjoy? I’m much more the person who’d rather build it. That brings me satisfaction.”


The playground metaphor is apt: The Internet is supposed to be a great place for sharing and disseminating, which is how a joke evolves into a meme in the first place. Huh has actually been accused of being a bit of a schoolyard mooch — sponging up clever ideas that don’t belong to him (or anyone, really) and dispatching them to mainstream (read: lame) audiences for his own personal gain.

Huh doesn’t take credit for inventing lolcats or any of the other trends he has adopted and adapted. Nonetheless, he has numerous online critics who have expressed their displeasure by subjecting Huh and his wife to flame wars, denial-of-service attacks, and death threats.

Scenes from the office, clockwise from top left: scheduling a post on thatwillbuffout.com; T-shirt designs for LOLmart Shirts; sticky note idea board; brainstorming whiteboard.
Photos: Misha Gravenor

Most of this has been organized, not surprisingly, by various so-called /b/tards on 4chan’s /b/ board, a sort of online Mos Eisley where members of the Anonymous griefer movement have previously planned raids against other ideological foes, like Scientology and YouTube. To many of them, Huh is a poseur who is exploiting and overexposing their underground culture. “When someone throws their name on something that’s been around for a while and that’s not really theirs, it pisses off the people who liked it when it was a more pure thing,” says a longtime 4chan participant who goes by the name Sethdood. “Anonymous doesn’t want to be associated with anything that cleans itself up for kids or that’s goofy and nice. They’ll disown it as soon as it doesn’t become theirs anymore.” Another veteran 4channer, who goes by the handle Kakama, compares Huh’s company to a teenybopper mall franchise: “Huh’s enterprise is the Hot Topic of the Internet. Every time we walk around and hear some random guy going ‘LOL! I can has cheezburger!’ it’s disgusting. It’s like a little bit of our culture has been taken out and defiled.”

Huh refuses to let the haters get to him. “This is all part of the game,” he says. “And if I were scared, what am I going to do? I mean, it’s the Internet. If somebody wants to come find me, somebody will.”

The Cheezburger Network headquarters is located on the second floor of a five-story office building. This afternoon the crew of 10 Cheezburger moderators — all in their early to mid-twenties — are clustered in one corner, headphones slung around their necks. The moderators spend hours drilling into the inner core of YouTube and wading through the thousands of user-uploaded photos and videos on Cheezburger’s various sites in search of one amazing thing to snap up. Every few minutes, someone cues up a warbled home-video musical performance or old videogame theme song. Huh also has 10 writers scattered around the country, some of whom are plucked directly from the meme world (Brad O’Farrell, originator of the “Keyboard Cat” meme, oversees Daily Squee).

“What are the rules for butts on This Is Photobomb?” asks a tall, bespectacled moderator named Steve Ibsen, referring to a site that collects crude and candid party pictures.

“If there’s a crack,” Kane replies, “you gotta cover it up.”

Huh is sitting just outside the windowless former server closet he now calls his office. It’s not the most august perch for a CEO, but years ago Huh learned the pitfalls of executive excess. In January 2000, after graduating from Northwestern University with a journalism degree, he founded his own analytics startup. When the Nasdaq crashed that spring, Huh was forced to close up shop. “It was an abysmal failure,” he says. “I hired too many people. I didn’t raise enough money. We didn’t actually have a product.”

Huh spent the next several years moving around the tech industry, from an Internet-radio startup to a software-installation firm. In early 2007, he and his wife started a modest pet-news blog called Itchmo. The site became a must-read for animal lovers, including Eric Nakagawa, one of the original cofounders of I Can Has Cheezburger?

Nakagawa and his partner, Kari Unebasami, had launched Cheezburger in 2007 after spotting a Something Awful image of a wide-eyed, overly excited kitty accompanied by the caption “I can has cheezburger?” They began collecting other lolcat pictures from sites like 4chan and Something Awful and installed their own lolcat builder for visitors to slap cat patois captions on their own photos.

When Nakagawa linked to an Itchmo post in May, Huh’s site was so flooded with traffic that it crashed. After corresponding with Nakagawa and Unebasami, Huh learned that Cheezburger’s traffic was exploding — and the owners were overwhelmed. “At that point, I was putting in 20 hours a day and not getting a lot of sleep,” Nakagawa says. “We were getting a few thousand pictures a day. We were a little burned out.”

Sensing that lolcats had crossed from radar-blip Web fad to full-on phenomenon, Huh decided to seize the opportunity. In August he made Nakagawa an offer over IM to buy I Can Has Cheezburger? (and its sister site called I Has a Hotdog!). He put down $10,000 of his own money, got some investors, and the deal was finalized a month later. The Cheezburger Network was born. Neither Nakagawa nor Huh would disclose the financial details, but published reports put the purchase price as high as $2 million.

By February 2008, the Cheezburger Network had launched GraphJam and Pundit Kitchen, where users could insert droll commentary onto snapshots of candidates Sarah Palin and Barack Obama. Meanwhile, Huh scoured the Internet for more material he could transform into memes. “I thought, ‘Dude, there’s so much more of this stuff — why aren’t we doing it?’” he says.

Cheezburger moderators Joe Olk and Lisa Kacerosky search YouTube and thousands of user-upload photos and videos for material.
Photos: Misha Gravenor

As Cheezburger expanded, Huh refined the company’s modus operandi: Rip off a concept from the Web and seed a site devoted to the idea with material that’s already floating around. Next, if needed, sharpen the content with snark produced by a stable of moderators and writers. Then turn it over to users to riff on the meme. Huh has attempted about 40 sites so far, not all of them successful: The Twitter-wiki parody 140pedia, for example, flopped. Huh says he’ll give a floundering site a month or two before shutting it down and repurposing the content.

Right now, the Cheezburger Network pretty much pwns the meme-aggregation marketplace, but it’s a wobbly dominion. Theoretically, anyone can set up a Tumblr account and, with an hour or so of Web surfing, create a clearinghouse for Hitler Downfall parodies. Memes can now spread more rapidly (and therefore risk flaming out just as quickly) thanks to real-time tracking sites like the Daily Meme and Know Your Meme. Which means that for Huh, the real challenge is not in figuring out what’s funny but sussing out the exact moment something will jump from image-board fringe to moms-forwarding-it ubiquity.

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.

Huh has about 150 other ideas in development and about 1,000 registered domain names. He has also been talking with Hollywood producers about expanding his Cheezburger brands into television series. Nowadays, people don’t forward memes to Huh; they pitch them. Usually, he preempts them by saying that he’s probably already heard it before — and that he’s already working on it himself. “If you see a similar site in the future, it doesn’t mean we took your idea,” he says. “And if you’re OK with that, then you can tell me.” Just don’t try boinking-pooches.com. That’s a guaranteed FAIL.

Source: Contributing editor Brian Raftery (brian raftery@gmail.com) wrote about B-movie production house Asylum in issue 18.01.