In These Dark Times, We Turn To Lolcats For Comfort

Times are tough, but Pet Holdings, the company behind ICanHasCheezburger, isn’t complaining – from September to October the company saw its traffic grow by 23%, reaching 128.3 million total page views and 6.3 million unique visitors across its network of blogs. The profitable network includes nine properties, each of which posts humorous content focused on a different internet meme. The most popular by far is ICanHasCheezburger, which frequently features pictures of cats alongside user-added captions. The site is now the 14th ranked blog on Technorati (falling just behind Gawker). Other notables in the network include failblog and IHasAHotDog.

In August, the network reported a 43.5% leap in revenue month-over-month, coinciding with the launch of new blogs EngrishFunny (a site making fun of phrases poorly translated into English) and roflrazzi, which features celebrity images with captions added. Since then revenue growth has steadied out, with an increase of 11.5% in September and 9.4% in October.

But despite its growth the site will not be immune to a steep downturn in ad sales. To help diversify, the company now sells merchandise through retail stores, and is selling some of its top pictures in book form (one is already on shelves and three more are in the works). To further encourage growth, the site will be releasing an API for its photos within the next month.