Internet content connoisseur Ben Huh -- the man behind icanhascheezburger.com, Failblog, and LOLcat -- explains our fascination with cat photos, cheeseburger hats and misspelled words -- and how it can lead to online success.
In September 2007, Ben Huh, the founder of Pet Holdings Inc., bought icanhascheezburger.com, a Web site featuring funny pictures of cats with misspelled captions (an internet meme known as a LOLcat). Since then, life has been good. In addition to icanhascheezburger.com, his company now owns a number of highly trafficked sites like failblog.org and punditkitchen.com, boasting network-wide totals of 170 million page views a month and annual revenue in the millions of dollars.
As you might expect from a guy who saw opportunity in a URL that's virtually impossible to spell, he has a nontraditional view of how to run a business. He recently talked about success, humor and the meaning of his cheeseburger hat.
You have a degree in journalism from Northwestern University -- what made you stray from that career path?
I wanted to be a journalist all my life. But then I found out how much it paid. And it was 1999, and they were handing out signing bonuses to college kids to go work at dotcoms. So I sold out. Absolutely.
Did you pick up much about being an entrepreneur while working for tech startups?
Well, I can't say I learned anything related to the content I handle now. That part probably came more from me just liking things on the Internet and goofing around, which I guess is not how people usually consider starting a startup.
But I learned how to keep costs low and make sure that whatever commitment you make to employees, you keep -- fundamental rules that I think people overlook. No matter how strange or ridiculous a business looks, those fundamentals still need to be there.
If you were talking to someone who hasn't seen any of your sites, what would you tell him that Pet Holdings does?
Pet Holdings basically makes people happy for five minutes every day. That's really all we want to do. It's a simple-sounding goal, but to be consistently funny day in and day out for five minutes (which is the average attention span of a blog reader) is actually very difficult to do.
Is there a strategy in how you choose which sites to buy?
We're interested in stuff that has longevity and has the ability to gain new audiences. So it can't be too specific. So even though icanhascheezburger is relatively old in the world of Internet memes, we don't know if it will die down. It seems to me that if the content is good enough, it will survive and grow.
But we're just having fun [laughs]. It's not very entrepreneury or businessy, but we've always been very much counterculture when it comes to marketing.
You don't have a business plan.
No, not exactly. We have a good time and we think if we enjoy something, other people will, too. It's counterintuitive, but we don't actually plan anything beyond 30 days. We tell ourselves we're here to be flexible and to be nimble, and not necessarily to stick to a master plan.
So advertisers "get" this?
I think more and more people are getting it. What's more surprising is that smaller companies have gotten it. We have a ton of small and midsize businesses that come back and advertise month after month. We are just now starting to see more pick-up from bigger businesses. They're just slower to move because they have that corporate mentality.
In some ways, it sounds almost too good to be true. You saw something you liked on the Internet, and then you bought it, and it became this huge phenomenon. Was it really that easy?
Uh, yes. I don't know how else to put it [laughs]. We bought something, and then that month it sort of skyrocketed, and we got another Web site and the month we bought it, it started skyrocketing, and so on and so forth. Luck had a lot to do with it.
That's nice. Most people probably don't have such a good time while they're making money.
That's kind of the ridiculous part about this whole business, where I think no one else knows what the hell is going on. It's kind of a corner of the Internet that people don't consider as a serious business, but it is very serious. This is new media in a very real sense.
Tell me about the day-to-day at the office.
The entire network is driven by user-generated content. It's user-sourced and user-filtered, and we basically moderate it. We have 600 square feet of office space, and there are a lot of people in here writing code, doing [paperwork]--it's very much like an Internet startup operation.
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