The History of I Can Has Cheezburger

by Jarrett Martineau | August 22, 2008 at 02:59 pm

2554 views | 14 Recommendations | 15 comments

Leave it to Gnomedex to serve up a fascinating look at the most popular internet meme ever created: the ubiquitous and gut-busting LOLCat world of I Can Has Cheezburger.

How does one build an empire on pictures of cats with silly, misspelled captions?

As most fans of the Internet now know, I Can Has Cheezburger has become one of the most popular sites online. Its daily collection of LOLCats is the source of endless humor, and you can be pretty sure that someone in your office is reading the site and chuckling to themselves right now.

But how did it happen?

At the Gnomedex conference here Friday, I Can Has Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh talked about the genesis of the site, and some of the milestones it has gone through as it has become not only a household name but the vanguard--if not the originator--of one of the most popular memes ever to hit cyberspace.

The popularity of LOLcats officially began on January 11, 2007, when the notorious cheezburger-captioned cat was discovered by Eric Nakagam and Kari Unebasami and the domain name was registered:

On that day, Huh said, the original founders of I Can Has Cheezburger, Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, found a LOLCat with a now-famous grey fluffy cat meowing over the words, "I Can Has Cheezburger?"
For whatever reason, it struck a chord, and immediately, the two registered icanhascheezburger.com and started their site.

And the rest, as they say, is history...'100 million page views a month' kind of history.

As a result, I Can Has Cheezburger now has six sister sites. There's Pundit Kitchen and GraphJam, which focus on politics and graphs; I Has a Hot Dog, about dogs; Totally Looks Like, an entertainment-oriented site; Fail Blog, which I Can Has Cheezburger bought and which pokes fun at people's screw-ups; and Engrish Funny, a site with photos of signs mangling English.

Now, the main site is approaching 100 million page views a month and Huh said he thinks it will top a billion page views in 2008.

All told, it has more than 800,000 LOLCats in its database and now, an I Can Has Cheezburger book is in the works. It will come out in October.

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mindanarchist

at 15:09 on August 22nd, 2008

I find the pattern of website phenomenon to book interesting and totally counter intuitive. The same thing happened with 'Stuff White People Like'. 7 weeks on the NYT Best Seller list. Who said old media was dead? Huh? Who said that? It's just changing.

Does I Can Has Cheeseburger make money?

Monte (not verified)

at 20:39 on August 22nd, 2008

jarrett, Thanks fo the article. I wondered how "I Can Has Cheezburger?" came about. It is a cool site and some of the lines an pictures are just classic. A small ray of funny in an otherwise too serious world.

PEP

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 20:41 on August 22nd, 2008

Jarrett Martineau, I like this story. It's good stuff.

I can haz laffs at catz site.

Andy King

at 22:17 on August 22nd, 2008

Andy King has contributed a photo to this story.

Xwarq

at 22:41 on August 22nd, 2008

Some photos from here. (trackback wouldn't work)

Barry ORegan

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 23:02 on August 22nd, 2008

Jarrett Martineau, I like this story. It's good stuff. Friggin hilarious

Shunklies

at 23:38 on August 22nd, 2008

Interesting article, Lolcats keep me entertained

Shunklies has contributed a photo to this story.

Uwe Paschen

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 01:55 on August 23rd, 2008

Jarrett Martineau, I like this story. It's good stuff. :)

Moon-Spinner

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 08:15 on August 23rd, 2008

Jarrett Martineau, I like this story. It's good stuff.

madfoot

at 08:28 on August 23rd, 2008

I'm seriously lolcats-obsessed. I made a set of Tom Cruise ones when that video of him cackling about SPs was making the rounds; I made a few in tribute to LeRoy Jenkins; and my friends know they can rely on me to return a photo -- any photo -- within moments, but lolcatted. So when I was handed a DVD of photos from my 12-week ultrasound ... this was just inevitable.

madfoot has contributed a photo to this story.

josdog5

at 15:08 on August 23rd, 2008

Heidi wanted my lolcat photos on Nowpublic so i said why not?

josdog5 has contributed a photo to this story.

robburke

at 05:12 on August 24th, 2008

Great summary - thank you for this article. Hard to believe this phenomenon has stayed funny for so long . The FractLOL is made up of 2,442 LOLCat images from the venerable icanhascheezburger turned into a zoomable photomosaic - hope you enjoy! kthxbye!