The website and show “Know Your Meme” were swallowed up this week by ICanHasCheezburger networks in a seven figure deal, proving once again that Internet memes are serious business. In light of this news, the Know Your Meme crew, Internet folklorists Elspeth Rountree, Kenyatta Cheese, Jamie Wilkinson, Patrick Davison and Mike Rugnetta actually performed an episode of their heralded show live on stage today at Web 2.0 Expo. → Read More
Cheezburger, the internet publisher responsible for LOLcats, FAIL Blog, and other memes, has raised a whopping $30 million in new funding led by the Foundry Group with Madrona Venture Group, Avalon Ventures, and SoftBank Capital participating in the round. Brad Feld of Foundry Group, Greg Gottesman of Madrona Venture Group, and Rich Levandov of Avalon Ventures will be joining Cheezburger’s board of directors. This latest investment brings the startup’s total funding to $32.5 million
Founded in 2007 by former journalist Ben Huh, Cheezburger has grown from a small site to a network of fifty sites that have brought internet memes and tech culture mainstream. Cheezburger’s network of sites has a total user base of 16.5 million people who upload more than 500,000 pictures and videos as well as view 375 million pages and 110 million videos each month. → Read More
Cheezburger Network, the company behind I Can Has Cheezburger and a number of other humorous blogs, has unveiled the newest addition to its popular blog network: OnceUponAWin, a site dedicated to finding and posting nostalgic photos and videos from your childhood.
I have a hard time believing OnceUponAWin will be as popular as the network’s flagship blog about lolcats or FAIL Blog, a favorite around the TechCrunch office. But it’s a solid addition to the network, and will only further boost Cheezburger Network traffic, which has been growing at a steady clip. From September to October the site saw a 19% increase in the number of unique visitors and a total of 128.3 million page views. → Read More
The company behind the popular ICanHasCheezburger site has launched a new website, EngrishFunny, which makes fun of grammatically incorrect variations of English (often found in Asia). Users send in photos of poorly translated or written products, signs, instructions, etc. to the site. This is the seventh website for parent company Pet Holdings, Inc., which bought the ICanHasCheezburger site in late 2007 for $2 million. Other sites include Ihasahotdog (dogs), Failblog (my personal favorite), Totallylookslike (celebrities), Punditkitchen (politics) and Graphjam. I sat down with founder Ben Huh today to talk about the new site and how the company is doing in general. The family of sites is generating 3.3 million daily page views, and around 5 million unique monthly visitors. Total revenue per page is north of $0.80, he says. Watch the full interview below. → Read More
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