About

http://cheezburger.com/

The Cheezburger Network is a network of memetic content hubs, some of them already created famous memes such as LOLCats and Demotivational posters.

Origins: I Can Has Cheezburger?

I Can Has Cheezburger? (ICHC for short) is the name of a weblog featuring lolcats, which are comical pictures of cats with captions, and other animal images. It was created in 2007 by Eric Nakagawa (Cheezburger), a blogger from Hawaii and his girlfriend, Kari Unebasami (Tofuburger). The website is one of the most popular internet sites displaying lolcats receiving as many as 1,500,000 hits per day. ICHC was instrumental in bringing animal-based image macros and lolspeak into mainstream usage.
According to Time magazine, a group of investors acquired the website in September 2007 for US $2 million.
ICHC was created on January 11, 2007, when Nakagawa posted an image from Something Awful of a smiling British Shorthair, known as Happycat, with a caption of the cat asking, “I can has cheezburger?” in a style popularized by 4chan. It is from this image that the site derives its name. After posting similar images, Nakagawa then converted the site to a blog.

A network of related sister sites has developed alongside ICHC, called the Cheezburger Network. Twelve of these are linked to each other via a navigation bar at the top of each site; apart from “I Can Has Cheezburger”, these are:

• I Has a Hotdog, which follows the same themes as ICHC but predominantly features dogs
• ROFLrazzi, making fun of celebrities in general and showing pictures of funny things in show * business.
• Totally Looks Like, which matches celebrities and famous people with humorous animals, other people, cartoons, and others.
• Pundit Kitchen, which pokes fun at news, politics, and politicians.
• Up Next in Sports, highlighting images of various sports, many of which are taken out of context or featuring innuendo unintended by the photographer and athletes.
• Graph Jam, a blog for humorous office graphs such as line graphs, Venn diagrams, bar graphs and pie charts.
• There I Fixed It, showing pictures of kludges.
• FAIL Blog, containing pictures and videos of blatant stupidity or incompetence with captions involving the terms “Fail” and “Epic Fail” prominently, and sometimes “Win” when the word “fail” is incorporated with said stupidity. “Owned” and “Pwned” have been used periodically, but the site itself no longer advertises its support of these images, as they are no longer featured prominently.
• Failbook, featuring failures from social networking sites, mostly Facebook.
• Engrish Funny, supplying pictures of humorous foreign translation errors known as “Engrish”.
• Learn From My Fail, featuring moments of blatant stupidity and incompetence in the form of words as written by the submitter.
• Hawtness, showing women in bizarre poses and situations.
• Art of Trolling, showing trolls’ humorous screenshots from sites such as Mormonchat, ChatRoulette and Omegle.
• Memebase, collection of trolling based web comics and captioned pictures e.g. troll science, a web comic with various economic and physics based loopholes.

Apart from these sites, other sites exist from the makers of “I Can Has Cheezburger”, which can be found at http://cheezburger.com/sites. As of June, 2010, the Cheezburger Network has 53 sites; launching new sites is a regular project although about 20% of new sites end in failure. One famous example is a Cheezburger site named “Tofulator”, which was a site in which videos are captioned, has not been updated since September 2009. No submissions have been entered as well; this might be because the majority of the videos come from Youtube, and Youtube had launched the feature of captioning a user’s video as of late 2009. Another example is “Probably Bad News”, which depicted funny mistakes in newspapers, but was merged with FAIL Blog.

Know Your Meme acquisition

The Cheezburger Network bought the popular meme etymology site Know Your Meme on March 28, 2011, Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh told CNET.

The deal was first reported by Tubefilter, which said that Know Your Meme, which was a spin-off from Rocketboom, is getting a low seven-figure payday. Huh would not discuss the financials of the deal.

Know Your Meme has become famous as a place where people can go to learn about the origins of some of the Internet’s most beloved time-wasters. And that’s precisely why Cheezburger bought it. “Right now, we’re an entertainment destination,” Huh said of the network’s many sites. “A lot of the stuff we show doesn’t have a lot of content…People require context, history, and origins which helps them understand why this is funny or why this isn’t funny. And Know Your Meme was probably doing the best job of that out there.”

(Sauce: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20048067-52.html )