How I Can Has Cheezburger became a web empire

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/technology/internet/14burger.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

by jlangenauer • 16 years ago

52 41 16 years ago

nytimes.com

alttab2• 16 years ago

Amazing to hear the numbers. I'll file this one under ifart and question my career again. I can has breakdown.

joezydeco• 16 years ago

iFart? My category is called "We Think Too Hard"

fierarul• 16 years ago

>Cheezburger now has more than 40 employees and has not sought additional investment.

[Teal'c voice]: Indeed.

FlemishBeeCycle• 16 years ago

It makes sense though. You're essentially allowing your user-base to feed itself - they generate the content and then consume the content. Nobody knows what the audience wants better than the audience themselves.

MartinCron9• 16 years ago

I'm not exactly an objective observer (I'm one of the ~40 that works for Cheezburger) but I think the comparison to ifart is a little unfair.

It's not all Lolcats, you know. Take a look through the >50 sites and if you can't find something that makes you laugh, you should see your doctor. Seriously

http://cheezburger.com/sites/

psyklic• 16 years ago

It is iFart, you just diversify your comedy portfolio!

chime2• 16 years ago

Creativity comes in all flavors. Someone creates a Jump-to-Conclusion mat and makes a million while someone spends their entire life working on elliptic curves to improve cryptography. Get-rich-quick stories entice even the most brilliant of the minds and we're no different. A story about some kid making $35k/month from a stupid app for iPhone makes people wonder why they even bother learning Clojure or spending hours improving their writing skills. The truth is, you must ask yourself what will make you truly happy - being the developer of a gimmick app that made money or someone who has directly contributed to the world with their efforts.

Upon hearing the above, many have said "well, once you have lots of money, say like the reddit guys, you can spend your time doing what you love and help the world." No. The reddit guys WERE doing what they loved and would have done what they're now doing regardless of the money. Sure, having money like Elon Musk helps but then again, it may not. If you hate your career now, get the ball rolling to change it. If you are happy with it, who cares if someone else made millions sharing pictures of cats? I mean do you feel bad that someone in India made $10m selling a special type of plastic sheet to farmers? Or someone in South Africa made millions selling vuvuzelas?

If your ultimate goal is to make money, then certainly wonder if you chose the right career. Money laundering or even investment banking might be a better path. Otherwise, realize the money is just a serendipitous by-product of any venture.

starkfist• 16 years ago

The money made by icanhazcheezburger was not "the serendipitous by-product of any venture". A guy bought the site from someone else with the intention of making money off of it.

Getting rich selling plastic sheets to indian farmers does not bother most hackers because it's completely outside of their domain. Building a website or iFart app is not.

roel_v• 16 years ago

"Or someone in South Africa made millions selling vuvuzelas?"

If I ever find that guy, he's in for a world of pain.

jessriedel2• 16 years ago

Got-rich-quick stories aren't bad because you'd be unhappy to be wealthy by getting lucky off of a silly idea, they're bad because most people just aren't going to be lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. Instead, most people have to work hard doing things like learning Clojure or improving their writing skills in order to produce a product that society really wants.

alttab2• 16 years ago

Wow... a lot of responses. I guess I forgot the "</sarcasm>".

All great points though, nothing I don't already agree with.

mynameishere• 16 years ago

If the comment section on icanhascheeseburger doesn't drive you to suicide, you're probably safe keeping that 45 in your house.

Daniel_Newby• 16 years ago

I'd forgotten about the comments. Blocked them out, really.

thunk• 16 years ago

Well, that and toxoplasmosis.

MartinCron9• 16 years ago

In a move that isn't at all shocking, the NY Times reporter didn't have much interest in talking with me or any of the other Cheezburger Network developers when she was in our office a few weeks ago.

If anyone is curious about the technical side of what we do and how we do it, I'll gladly answer questions here.

Also, we're looking for software developers. We're in Seattle, and have a strong bias for local talent, but we have a bunch of remote deveopers. Of the dozen or so companies I've worked for, Cheezburger is hands down the best. Srsly. Email martin@cheezburger.com if you're interested.

iamjustlooking2• 16 years ago

I'm sure from a reporter perspective it doesn't appear like there's much of a technical side to what appears to be a wordpress blog with cats on it.

MartinCron9• 16 years ago

That's why I would expect a reporter to, when introduced to a bunch of technical people to ask, "what? there's a technical side?"

Then we could talk about how we make systems to help the editorial team sort through the 16,000 content submissions we get every day, or how we have a public API so people can submit funny content from their applications.

The "wordpress blog with cats on it" is a very shallow view of the company. There's a lot more going on than that.

greyman• 16 years ago

Yes, I would be interesting about the technical side, like how the publishing backend works, how do you manage the large number of submissions, etc.

MartinCron9• 16 years ago

So, our core backend system is a SQL database with two ASP.NET MVC (C#) web site front ends

1) cheezburger.com, the one that our users use to make content via our tools (Caption tools, graph builder, etc.). It's also a niche social network, where people curate their favorites, message with friends, etc.

2) The internal site that our moderators use to sift through submissions.

Nothing shows up on any of our voting pages without having been screened by a moderator. Nothing shows up on any of our sites' front pages without having been voted on by the community. A lot of what makes things work is the mix of editorial guidance and community feedback. It's not a pure democracy, but it's not a pure dictatorship, either. It turns out that a lot of deliberate thought and hard work goes into running a funny web site. I'm constantly amazed at how our editorial team is perpetually refining their process and sharing knowledge.

The software does things like automatically filter out duplicates and allow moderators to filter by items that have been added as a favorite by members of our community, etc. We also try to automate as many mind-numbing brute force things as possible, to let our humans do what only humans can do (answer "is this funny?") so the submission engine does things like automatically resizes and watermarks images. I personally spend about as much time working on software for around 16 moderators than I do working on software for around 16 million end users. Most of the moderators are in the office with me, and I really love having the low communication overhead of just being able to walk over there and ask "what exactly do you want, again?"

Almost all of our front-end sites are running a single custom Wordpress theme (PHP) hosted by Wordpress VIP (even with the recent downtimes, nobody is better at hosting Wordpress than Wordpress/Automattic). We send content there through the WP XML-RPC API. We use some extra metadata to identify posts as "voting" or "front page", and our theme is able to filter by that. We've also written some custom wordpress code to do things like display the "you may also like", integrate with your cheezburger.com account to add favorites, etc.

Both the content backend and the wordpress frontend are generalized enough so that we can usually get a new site from concept to launch in around a week. Some sites (senorgif.com, for example) require backend changes (support for Animated GIFs).

From a process side, we try to be cutting edge without falling into trendy bullshit buzzwords. We use a variation of Kanban, where we visualize and limit work-in-progress to keep things flowing through our system quickly in a way that allows us to respond quickly to new ideas or emergent problems. Our team is distributed, we use Campfire for multiple rolling discussions. Tokbox for video chat, Skype for screen sharing, and Kiln for distributed source control and code reviews.

With a few exceptions (only one guy really knows Flash) every one on the team is a multi-technology generalist, working on the full stack, top-to-bottom, front-to-back. We generally work in thin vertical stripes rather than thick horizontal layers. As a result, I'm able to have an idea for a feature on Monday morning and have it coded, reviewed, tested, and deployed by Tuesday morning.

We have multiple layers of test automation and monitoring, which allow us to turn around those small releases very quickly with very little manual human testing. We have a goal to do IMVU-style continuous deployment, where every submit to our central code repository would, if all tests pass, automatically trigger a zero-downtime production code update, but we're not quite there yet.

bhiggins• 16 years ago

How well do you get paid? I only ask because it seems like Ben Huh makes a big deal of not paying a lot of money to his employees.

MartinCron9• 16 years ago

Thanks for asking about this.

Ben's remarks on that were a reaction to a bunch of candidates for entry level position complaining loudly about entry level pay. He noticed that being hung up on pay was inversely proportional to perceived awesomeness (although some of this may be sour grapes and/or confirmation bias). It turned into a bit of a fiasco and I'm sure he regrets saying anything about it.

The truth is, people at Cheezburger are paid at competitive market rates. The entry level positions are entry level. Positions for experienced professionals with specialized technical skills and relevant education are not. I have no complaints about what I earn. Benefits could stand to be a little better, but that's always tough for small companies.

spotter2• 16 years ago

Get used to it. You aren't a founder - or at least haven't been presented as one (hmmm...) To the rest of the world you are no better than the guy who empties the trash. This is also what your boss Ben thinks but he's probably smart enough to keep his opinion to himself - as long as you're making him rich.

MartinCron9• 16 years ago

Why should I or anyone else think I'm better than the guy who empties the trash? A lot of what I do is the technical equivalent of janitorial work. I get paid more than physical-world trash guys, but that's just because fewer people can do what I do. It's not because I'm a better person. I'm probably not.

I'm fully aware that I'm working to make Ben (and his investors) rich, I went to business school so I know how these things work. I'm a consenting adult. I get paid for doing work that I enjoy and hanging out with people whom I like. I'm totally OK with this arrangement.

When I tell people where I work, I get two distinct reactions. "I can has what?" or "OMG! That's so cool! What do you do there!" I think that what we're doing is interesting from both a business and a technical standpoint and I thought I would offer to share with the HN audience.

ck2• 16 years ago

Step 1: Take content from everyone and everywhere else and put it on your own site.

jessriedel2• 16 years ago

More like, come up with a great web-interface to allow a single, one-time idea from an individual user (which otherwise would have been heard only by him and his friends) to be made available to the entire internet.

mikeleeorg3• 16 years ago

I'm a little surprised that no one's caught on to the real business model behind Cheezburger Network.

What they're doing is pretty clever. It's more than just a bunch of silly captions under photos of cats. They're building a system that capitalizes on Internet memes that can be presented in a blog-like fashion.[1]

That, to me, is a mark of a potentially sustainable business model. To break it down in more detail:

a) They monitor Internet memes

b) They evaluate which ones are worthy of a trial run

c) They launch a site around it

d) They assess that site's success (using whatever metrics they've discovered are important, such as PVs and unique visitors for advertisers)

e) They pull the plug if the trial is not successful

It's not a new business model, but it's a clever one that's obviously working. I'm particularly impressed that they're aiming to launch a site every week, and kill only 20% of those experiments. I wonder if that number is low.

That's why they're more than just a WordPress blog with cats on it.

[1] The similarities to a blog are probably incidental. I imagine they basically want a way to display recent user-generated entries and allow other users to comment on them. A blogging system naturally satisfies these attributes. Otherwise, I don't think they necessarily need their sites to look like blogs, per se.

medianama• 16 years ago

Could you elaborate this further? Just want to understand this better

mikeleeorg3• 16 years ago

Sure. MartinCron may be able to answer this question better than I can, but I'll give you my outsider's perspective.

I think it starts with the assumption that people enjoy sites that make them laugh. We all need a break from our hectic days for a few smiles. That's why sites like The Onion, FML, Stuff White People Like, etc have thrived. They have hilarious content that's updated often and draws people back again & again.

Advertisers love being any place there are masses of people - particularly a place that can matches their target demographics and fits their brand.

Right there, you could have a fair business. Funny content + advertisers.

But to make this business scalable, you need a lot of content. Writing content is difficult and expensive. You would have to hire a lot of comedy writers (a la College Humor) to constantly pump out great stuff. It's not impossible, obviously, but for every College Humor there are dozens of failed sites who just weren't funny enough.

There's a better way though. If you can encourage your audience to generate the content, you'll have a cost-effective (read: low-margin) way of creating great content, plus you'll get the audience involved and make them feel like part of the community. It's very satisfying to see your cat with your funny caption on icanhascheezburger.com. That's the kind of thing that can make you a long-term fan and repeat contributor.

To take this one step further, have the audience rate which pieces of user-generated content is good enough to be featured on the site. This is similar to the Threadless model. You don't need to actively pick the best pieces of content, you just let your audience do it for you. And your audience is probably the best judge of what they think is funny or not. It's crowd-sourcing at its best.

Now you have: (user generated content + user ratings = funny content) + advertisers

What's especially insightful is that Cheezburger Network took this another step further. They built a platform that allowed them to replicate this formula across various "humor niches," if you will. As MartinCron said, it's more than just Internet memes, it's any crowd-source-able humor.

The platform itself is what I alluded to in my previous comment. It allows them to cost-effectively launch new sites after they've analyzed new potential humor niches. They don't even have to be comedic geniuses (though with a failure rate of 20%, perhaps they are), they just have to launch lots of sites, then kill the ones that fail. This Darwinian approach will leave them with only high-quality content.

MartinCron didn't mention this in his description of the technology, but I imagine they also need an advertising system of some sort. Advertisers on icanhascheezburger.com may not want to advertise on ihasahotdog.com, for instance. Their ad system would have to be able to manage their ad inventory.

So here's what we have so far: (user generated content + user ratings = funny content) + (advertisers + managed ads)

And this is being replicated over & over again by their platform. I focus a lot on their platform because I believe that is what makes their business scalable. You could try building individual instances of such sites over & over again yourself, but it would take quite a bit of time. Automation is key to a scalable business.

On top of all this, it sounds like they're now adding a basic social network to further increase a user's involvement on the site. That will surely encourage current power users to become even more loyal. And the ability to share content on social media services will aid them with marketing reach. All smart moves towards scaling their business even further.

I hope that answers your question, medianama. A little long-winded perhaps, but I think I've covered most of the major points, as I see it. I'm sure others can elaborate even further.

MartinCron9• 16 years ago

I think a lot of people (including yourself) have caught on to the business model. It's just that many people can't get past the WTF factor of the funny cat site to see that there's a serious business there. Nobody is keeping what we're doing a secret.

It's not just "Internet memes" though, it's more about finding untapped types of crowd-source-able humor. There wasn't a popular "there, I fixed it" meme before we launched thereifixedit.com

I haven't been keeping explicit score, but the killing 20% figure feels about right. Our count of surviving sites has been constantly growing, we're up to 53 at the moment.

mikeleeorg3• 16 years ago

Ah yes, crowd-source-able humor! Now I'm even more impressed. 53 sites is a lot. Do you have people that oversee the content & comments on those sites?

FYI for anyone else who is curious like I am about what those 53 sites might be: http://cheezburger.com/sites

seanalltogether• 16 years ago

To me the cheezburger network is like the paparazzi of internet culture. Chasing down memes and raping them in front of thousands of viewers to provide a flash of cynical entertainment before moving on.

px• 16 years ago

Trivializes rape a little bit, doesn't it?

How I Can Has Cheezburger became a web empire

Related Stories