9GAG (YC S12) Raises $2.8M

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/07/30/funny-funding-humor-website-9gag-raises-2-8-million-and-releases-an-ios-app/

by adebelov • 14 years ago

71 53 14 years ago

thenextweb.com

debacle2• 14 years ago

Having only first visited 9gag two minutes ago, what is the appeal of this website?

icey• 14 years ago

As far as I can ascertain, it's an aggregator for funny pictures found on reddit.

conradfr• 14 years ago

Some kind of Reddit with funny images only ?

brianlovin• 14 years ago

1. Repost popular content on Reddit, 4chan 2. Spam the shit out of social links 3. ...? 4. Profit

vgurgov3• 14 years ago

actually they manage to build their own community around it. there was even 'war' 9gag vs 4chan sometime ago and surprisingly their members were able to defend against 4chan spam and even counter attack.

olh• 14 years ago

from

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untouchable• 14 years ago

"In less than nine months, 9GAG has more than quadrupled the number of monthly unique visitors to its site, going from 16 million to more than 70 million," said Tony Conrad, founding member and venture partner at True Ventures. "With its ability to easily and quickly spread entertaining visual content via Facebook and Twitter, the potential of 9GAG as a viral distribution platform is huge, and we look forward to working together with them to maximize this opportunity."

This seems like a large, risky bet to make on a humor site with fast growth but not much track record. I don't know a lot about 9GAG, but it seems like a case where since Funnyordie and Reddit were successful, any site with growth deserves investment.

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fredsters_s• 14 years ago

1+ BILLION pageviews per month. With a team that can kick enough ass to produce those metrics in such short time, doesn't seem so risky.

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freehunter• 14 years ago

Pageviews are easy, especially on a social picture aggregator. It's not hard to imagine one person clicking on hundreds of images per day. The hard part is trying to monetize these pageviews.

It doesn't take a kick-ass team to put up a link farm and spam it out. It takes a kick-ass team to profit from it and not tank the reputation. Digg failed. Reddit is struggling. I'm not sure 9gag will do any better.

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juan_juarez2• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, they have this little problem of not holding any rights to any of their content. This is of little concern now, as most of it is anonymous image macros and whatnot but, if they get big, some larger rights holders will start paying attention to them.

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therealarmen• 14 years ago

Over 1 billion monthly pageviews for r/funny in a pretty wrapper. I'm in the wrong business.

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angrydev• 14 years ago

Can we call it a bubble yet?

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benmccann• 14 years ago

They have a billion page views a month. I have no idea how well they're able to monetize, but at a $.20 CPM that's $2.4 million in revenue a year. Presumably they're still growing too. It seems pretty realistic that the investors could make their money back on this deal.

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kbanman• 14 years ago

I would guess that the majority of those visitors are minors without a credit card. Even if you could convince advertisers to pay for those impressions today, they would soon become wiser and realize that they have no value.

See facebook's steadily falling income as an example of this happening: sure they have a stupid number of pageviews, but people are learning the real value of a pageview today.

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moistgorilla• 14 years ago

I'm still waiting for the 4chan ipo

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moot• 14 years ago

Send an e-mail to ipo@4chan.org and I'll be sure to invite you to our roadshow.

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runn1ng• 14 years ago

Hey Moot!

ummmm... how are you doing?

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instakill• 14 years ago

seriously?

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akanet• 14 years ago

Sent an email with the subject "it's time to take this sucker public," and it bounced. For a minute... I dared to dream.

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brackin• 14 years ago

9GAG is Reddit for the 90%. They Cherrypick the best memes from Reddit and wrap them in a social layer of Facebook comments and timeline integration to make them even more viral.

This company will never be nearly as big as Reddit but it seems to me that they're going to become more of a media company than a democratised news platform.

We'll start to see 9GAG Magazine, the book and TV shows. Like SocialCam, if Facebook cuts off timeline access I imagine they'll see a huge drop in engagement.

Although anyone can submit content it's very much editorialised and I think that will become more about submitting content for the editors.

A huge problem they're going to face as they branch out is copyright. They're trying to make a more legitimate FunnyJunk and this requires them to start looking at revshare and how they deal with copyright as they're promoting copyright content rather than it just being user added.

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killwhitey• 14 years ago

>9GAG is Reddit for the 90%.

Content is created in the chaos that is discussion boards (4chan, SA before that). Then it is peer reviewed on aggregators (Reddit, Digg before that), and finally it is distributed to the masses in an easy to read format (9gag, tumblr, FB, etc.)

The problem is the lower the food chain you go the greater the resentment you see people have. People on reddit hate 9gag, people on reddit.com/new hate redditors that only view the front page, people on 4chan hate redditors for copying (or stealing) their memes. And everyone hates that the original message/humor gets lost or diluted each time to goes up a level.

Now you may not think that's a problem, but people on 4chan sure as hell don't want to see 9gag succeed, and the people who create the most content also create the most mischief.

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cluda01• 14 years ago

Did the 9GAG team join YC before or after developing this site?

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netvarun• 14 years ago

If what is stated in the title ('YC S12') is true, then definitely yes. 9Gag has been around for close to four years. But that begs another question? Why did they choose to join YC then? They already had their product out and had a pretty large user base - what does YC have to offer them?

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debacle2• 14 years ago

A rubber stamp for funding?

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andreasklinger2• 14 years ago

They started 2008 [1]. So far afterwards.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9gag

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radagaisus• 14 years ago

My impression is that 9gag is a social fad. Memes became mainstream and the 'cool kids' (the early adopters) are already making fun of le upboat XDD I mustache you a herp derp.

9gag is pretty popular in Israel[1]. My coworkers (20yo) still read it, but it was all the rage a few months ago, and in a family dinner my 13yo cousin asked me if I know the site. All this indicates the eternal cycle: 'knew them before it was cool' -> mainstream -> 'omg are you still into that?'

Dubstep (recent example) stopped being cool because it went mainstream. Memes will not stop being cool - image macros are the laziest way to get information - but 9gag (unless they do something crazy) will become just a site. Remember the esoteric tumblrs?

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mghhLqu31cQ

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andreasklinger2• 14 years ago

Sure. But not being "Cool" doesn't mean not being "Popular".

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antidaily• 14 years ago

Seems alot like... FunkyJunk. Hopefully they have nicer lawyers.

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dag11• 14 years ago

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better...

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ecdobry• 14 years ago

the underground dubstep scene is still cool.... digital mystikz, joker, mala, coki, kode9, and skream. I see what you are saying though.

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alecco• 14 years ago

I don't understand why reddit doesn't do the same thing on Facebook, perhaps in a mor ethical way with links to sources and sparing a few donations once in a while.

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tosbourn• 14 years ago

Oh man, Imgur users are not going to be happy, not happy at all.

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pg_bot• 14 years ago

I was a little confused to see that 9GAG was in this current batch for YC. 9GAG is a 4 year old company, what sort of benefit does YC give them? What will they demo at demo day? Why not go to traditional VCs at this stage of operation?

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swampthing• 14 years ago

There are plenty of relatively mature companies that go through YC - it gives you a leg up at pretty much any early stage. Demo day isn't really for demos anymore.

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niketdesai• 14 years ago

The 9gag team is solid.I first met them at 500Startups early last year.

At the time they were working on a number of products, but they truly had a mastery in understanding the creation and sharing process of people between 15-30. It showed within each product they created and it was ultimately 9gag that went bananas in terms of user adoption.

They also have a pretty neat mission that extends beyond a r/funny wrapper -- though with the myriad of clones and previously created similar sites there is some credit due to them for their rapid expansion.

I hope the raise will give them the resources to expand further as I have no doubt they are already doing quite well.

As for why YC -- probably to connect more fully in the Valley since they are (or intend to be) based in Hong Kong.

Pretty connected names in the investor list over at angel.co/9gag // Ben Ling, Chris Sacca, Kevin Rose etc..

Oh, and while I agree to some extent that sites like these marginally improve the internet, humour is a great remedy to many of our ails.

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Devilboy• 14 years ago

9GAG in YC. What the fuck.

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10098• 14 years ago

That was my initial reaction.

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cbrauchli• 14 years ago

It's all about the benjamins.

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bryanh• 14 years ago

I kind of see 9gag as the new College Humor, maybe bigger and more inclusive. Congrats to the team!

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thetabyte• 14 years ago

The big difference was that College Humor was/is a content creator, not just a content aggregator.

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mnicole• 14 years ago

4chan-initiated and Reddit-fueled, 9gag's content has already been manipulated and their Facebook wall flooded with horrific imagery, fake memes and general buffoonery in order to offend and humiliate their community, which is basically this generation's eBaum's World.

Serious question - for a site that relies on user-generated content, how does this money help create a better user experience or bring a more intellectual community? Reddit's main feed is slowly toppling over as the "masses" overpopulate the number of people that provide true value with the saving grace being the subreddits. I'd also venture to say that Reddit's only-recent transformation to having proper staff and a CEO (that were huge contributors to the community before their hiring) is something a lot of people like about it too.

I guess I'm confused why a site as content-reliant as 9gag needs funding to beat out (given that's the intent) what is fundamentally an issue with their userbase, who have already been the laughing stock of the internet for quite some time now.

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dreamdu5t• 14 years ago

What makes 9Gag different? Why did they succeed? How do they make money (right now, not tomorrow)?

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juan_juarez2• 14 years ago

They put links to blast content to all your friends on Facebook right at your fingertips. Easy for an image to go viral. Not really sure about a revenue stream but it's probably something shady about getting access to lots of people's Facebook profiles.

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RandallBrown• 14 years ago

What is 9GAG doing that other blogging companies like Cheezburger (failblog, knowyourmeme, etc.) aren't already?

The site doesn't seem like anything more than a wordpress template. What value do they add to the reddit content that people are posting on there?

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astrange• 14 years ago

Why did YC fund a content theft website?

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9GAG (YC S12) Raises $2.8M

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