"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true." ~Robert Wilensky, 1996
But they will produce lolcatz.
For those of you not in the know, lolcatz—much like rickrolling, experimental mentos and coke videos, and All Your Base Belong to Us—is a patently inexplicable internet fad wherein one combines a comical photograph of a cat with a caption filled with the purposeful misspellings and grammatical idiosyncrasies that are lolspeak. These captioned photos are then posted to any one of a number of image sharing messageboards, the most popular of which is the blog
I Can Has Cheezburger.
When a fellow Today’s Snowjobber first explained to me what a lolcat was, I just looked at him blankly.
“I don’t get it. So they’re pictures of cats?”
When he then showed me some examples of lolcattery:
“Yeah, I don’t get it.”
And as I’m writing this post, I’m still not sure that I get it.
In any case, my befuddlement is clearly not shared by the millions of internet users who post their captioned lolcat pictures with alarming regularity, nor by the good people at the
LOLCat Bible translation Project, whose (highly questionable) goal is to translate the entirety of the old and new testaments into lolspeak.
The term lolcat itself reached the mainstream when
Time covered the trend in July 2007, making reference to lolcatz' “distinctly old-school, early 1990s, Usenet feel” and pointing out the increasing rarity of such non-commercialized phenomena. At least this was the case until September 2007, when the site was purchased by a group of investors led by journalist-cum-internet entrepreneur, Ben Huh (pictured in one of the two images below).
While I Can Has Cheezburger was the first purchase by Huh’s company, Pet Holdings, it was not the last. Having seen the power of
internet memes to drag literally millions of pairs of eyes from their knitting, Java coding, or TPS reports to a land of momentary chuckles, Huh set about purchasing a number of the most popular meme blogs, going on to add
I Has a Hotdog (same idea but with dogs),
Pundit Kitchen (same idea but with politicians),
Once Upon a Win (a collection of largely unironically presented tidbits of nostalgia from the seventies and eighties),
Graphjam (various graphical representations of life); and
Failblog (a video and pictorial chronicle of failure on a commercial, personal, or systemic level), to his viral menagerie.
Though once a frequenter of I Can Has Cheezburger and a lolcats enthusiast, Huh has proven less a feline-obsessed shut-in than a canny marketer with an eye for aggregation. Since launching in January 2007, Pet Holdings has cannibalized their competition, growing their empire of the idiosyncratic to the point where Comscore reported that they had 495,000 unique visitors in February (To put that in perspective, your beloved Today’s Snowjobbers have had reached a total of 70 unique visitors to date). In one instance, when the site originators at
Engrish.com wouldn’t sell, Pet Holdings started up
a clone of the site and used their existing blog network to build up its traffic and content to point where it rivaled the original. Unfortunately for the creators of Engrish.com, as it turns out, it’s proven near impossible to trademark a meme (Cue the sound of several thousand copyright lawyers scribbling on legal pads.).
Despite its range of oddball assets, what intrigues me most about Pet Holdings is the extent to which its exceptionality—namely, its profitability—is feeding its buzz. The company has been featured in articles in
Slate,
The Seattle Times, Gawker, and multiple techblogs, and each time the thrust of the article has been: “Holy crap, they’re actually monetizing this bullsh*t?!” On a fundamental level, people are blown away that it’s possible to make money from graphs of
cognitive function under the influence of indo and gin n’ juice,
videos of kittens on invisible bikes, and the countless other short-lived forms of entertainment that Pet Holdings purveys.
The irony behind all the hype is that, while Pet Holdings is turning a profit with their ad-based model, it doesn’t appear to be a big one. Though, to the best of my knowledge, the company hasn't opened up their books for public consumption, Huh has noted that most of Pet Holdings profits have been re-invested in the company, and that he works out of a six-by-six server closet. And then there's this quote from a recent
interview on techflash.com, where Huh talks about the company’s move into the analog, hawking lolrus plush toys and blog-spawned books:
"It gives you a little bit of sense of how hard it is to make money online using advertising… And one of the difficulties is clearly the industry... When you are competing against millions of other sites trying to earn ad dollars, it does get difficult."As peddlers of peer-produced content, Pet Holdings is able to keep their overhead relatively low—as of February 2009 they totaled 11 employees—and, as a result, just might turn out to be a lasting enterprise. But, to my mind, they represent less the turning of the monetizing tide for web content providers that the exception than proves the rule. While five million page views per day looks great on a venture capital portfolio, it remains to be seen whether the company’s unprecedented two year run in the black can be sustained.
Let alone the notoriously fickle attention span of internet users.
That said, we’ll be selling Today’s Snow Job action figures and whitey T-shirts out of the trunk of Jedd’s car all week.
