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>> Kirsten Wiley: So good afternoon and welcome. My name is Kirsten Wiley and
I'm here today to introduce and welcome Ben Huh who is visiting us as a part of
the Microsoft research visiting speaker series.
How does one build an empire on pictures of cats with silly misspelled
captions? The cheezburger network which consists of over 30 popular humor
sites such as I Can Has Cheezburger, FAIL blog, there, I fixed it, ad e-mails
from crazy people has become an Internet phenomenon. Its daily collection of
laugh out loud cats, FAILs and Other Blunders are the source of endless humor.
How did this all happen and why do over 13 million people come to that he is
sites every day?
Here today to talk to us about this is Ben Huh.
him.
Please join me in welcoming
>> Ben Huh: It's great to hear it. Thank you so much for coming. I really
appreciate it. I've got a little bit of warning. If I start drooling, okay,
don't take a picture and post it to FAIL Blog. I went to the dentist this
morning to get a filling fixed. The dentist said, you know -- I said, be I
have to give a speech at 1:30. You know, can you make sure the anesthetic
wears off? And he said sure, no problem, be done in half an hour. It's been
three hours and the left side of my face is still numb. So life is always full
of surprises, isn't it?
So I'm going to tell you about probably the greatest surprise in my life so far
which is the success of what we do. And it all started out with this picture.
This is the first Lolcat that was posted on the site. And that's where the
name comes from, I Can Has Cheezburger. It was a boyfriend and a girlfriend in
Hawaii. The girlfriend found the photo on line, sent it to her boyfriend over
IM. He thought it was so funny, decided to buy the domain name. Just like
that, misspelled cheezburger and all. Posted a photo. Decided to make it a
blog because he wanted to post more photos because they kept on finding more,
and that's how it was born.
But this wasn't the first Lolcat.
[laughter]
In fact, before that we had this.
>> Ben Huh: This is a poster originally created in the '70s of a cat that is
supposed to, I guess, motivate you. Poor cat. But that actually wasn't the
first one either. We actually found about that, in 1905 -[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: -- this was a postcard actually found at an antique card in
Seattle. And we heard approximate about this over the Internet and somebody
said, I've got this picture, a postcard of a cat with a caption on it. It's in
all caps. It was found in a store in Seattle. And we had to track down this
lady. She came in. We saw the postcard. We saw the postmark from 1905, and
we thought this was the first Lolcat. But it seems like humanity's love for
cat pictures and cat captioning goes even before that.
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: Little shout out to the Microsoft cat group. I'm pretty sure that
if I were given a chance to go to Egypt and check out the sphinx, which is a
cat, by the way, with a human head, there's going to be a little hieroglyphic
inscription in the front. Right? And that, I'm guessing, is going to be the
very first Lolcat of all time.
So on January 11th, 2007 is when this site was born. And we were born because
the Internet really changed the world that we live in. The way we interact
with information literally changed over a span of less than a decade. It
became easy to publish. It became accessible to a lot of people. It connected
groups of people that were previously unconnected. I'm sure you've heard of
all this before, but there's a reason why the phenomenon of people actively
participated in the creation of, you know, cat pictures with funny captions
didn't occur prior to the Internet. Technology made it that much more possible
and likely that you would participate in this community.
So it started in January, and then by March, they were serving up a terabyte of
data a week. It was so much data that their $6.99 monthly host called them up,
Eric, one of the cofounders, and said, uh, you need to get off our servers
because you're consuming all of the data for that data. All right. Thousands
of websites hosted on one server, his was using all the data.
Well, I came along in roughly April of 2007. So when I first saw it, it was a
friend of mine that sent me a link. Said, hey, you should check this out.
Went to it, saw the cat pictures, and I said, "I don't get it."
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: What's wrong with this site? I don't understand. It's just cat
pictures, but I can't read what the hell is going on here. So I didn't go
back.
Another week had passed. Another friend sent me a link. You have to go to
this site. It's so funny. I went there. Still didn't get it. Why do people
keep sending me this link to this stupid site whose name I can't even
pronounce?
The third e-mail came by and I'm like, fine, I'll give it one more shot.
Apparently I was really bored at work. Kept on clicking links from people over
and over again. And I went there and I found one photo that I liked. And for
the love of me, I can't remember which one it was. And it got my attention and
I said, oh, I get it. The cats, they're talking.
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: And they don't know how to spell because they're cats. Oh, that's
funny.
Well, that have April of 2007. I ended up becoming Internet friends with Eric,
one of the two people that started the site, and I ended up helping him out
pro bono just because I wanted to. I showed the data about the site's traffic
growth to an e-mail investor friend of mine, and he suggested, "Why don't you
just buy it." I don't have that kind of money. He's like, all right, tell you
what. If you -- if you can actually start the company and run it, I'll help
you raise money. Said okay. So I put down $10,000 of my own money to buy a
cat blog.
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: Then I said, hey, Andy, help me ray the money, because I just put
$10,000 down for a cat blog I can't afford. So that was September of 2007, and
the company was born. And amazingly, we've been profitable since our first
month. Initial start up costs after buying the site was a laptop and pajamas.
Because out of downtown Bellevue, out of a two-bedroom apartment, I would get
up, walk to the living room, put on daytime television, and blog. And that
have the genesis of this business.
I had quit my job as a product manager for a startup in Bellevue making a
six-figure income because I just didn't want to do it anymore. I was really
six and tired of working for a client that didn't really care about what we
did. I was really tired of working for a company whose vision I didn't believe
in, and I said, you know, life has to be better than this.
I had a job offer to go be a product manager for a company in San Francisco.
Another startup down there. I love this sort of environment. I'm just a
startup guy. But I really couldn't pass up the opportunity to be my own boss
again. I had run a startup in 1999. Go-go-dot-com days. Remember that?
Didn't work out so well. So I said, you know what? It didn't work out so well
last time so I should really try again. So I did.
So I came in in September of '07. This is millions of page views. This is
when I showed up. The site had actually been kind of flat-lining before that,
and magically somehow it started growing again. And I really can't take all
the credit for it because I really didn't know anything. Couldn't tell a
banana from a corn. So the first thing we did was we didn't change anything at
all. We did absolutely nothing different, except we went to a regular
schedule. All right. So every X number of hour, we'd post up a new photo, and
we posted five pictures a day. We just basically said, look, we're going to
guarantee you five pictures a day that's actually of some decent quality and
then you'll come and you'll laugh. And that's the only thing that actually
made a difference between a flat-lining website versus one that grew.
And then we started building new websites. We're like, well, you know, that
worked so well, why don't we actually build some more. So we came across a
bunch of people on the Internet who were taking musical lyrics and turning them
into graphs using Excel. It's like, wow, that seems quite nerdy. I like it.
So we started a site called GraphJam. And today, what you see there is a
builder. So you actually go on line. You don't need Excel. Sorry. You can
literally just drag graphs.
Actually, little side note. Kind of funny. We ended up getting a lot of
submissions when we actually launched the builder, and a lot of them just
weren't funny at all. They looked like internal business graphs. And we kept
on getting more and more of these. It turn out somebody was using them to
actually create presentations.
Now, mind you, unlike Excel, you can literally just grab a corner and decide
that that's 30 percent. Like, you don't need numbers to create excel.
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: I wish I knew which company that was so I could short their stock.
So we actually posted an Excel template that said this is how you create a
graph and we put the instructions in Excel. And you have to download that
template, modify the numbers and e-mail it back to us. I thought, God, there's
no way this is going to work. It seems so much harder than putting captions on
a cat photo. But it did.
There was a small group of people who were passionate enough to actually keep
doing this. And what had happened was they had taken the site from my original
concept, which was musical lyrics in graph form, to life in graph form. So we
went with it. That's where that word jam, it has to do with music, but the
site has nothing to do with music anymore. Right. We let the people take over
the site. And that have one of the best things we did.
And then we launched more sites. It's remarkable, isn't it?
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: Even right down to the nose. I actually put that up like right
after Michael Jackson died. It was like somebody in the back was like: Too
soon!
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: And then we obviously had to of a dog site, right? So what's up
with the crazy words, right? What's up with all the misspellings? Well, it
comes from the fact that we're combining a whole bunch of different
technology-based linguistical roots, I guess. The ones, link speak standing
for elite, which is kind of a hacker-based language, mixing them with letters.
One is texting. One is common misspellings. And I just through in
"Shakespere" there. It's misspelled, I know, for a reason. It's because
English as a language evolves. Unlike French, which is actually a government
of body that decides what French is and decide that this is a proper way to do
things. English is a language that is easily adaptable. It's a flexible
language that can borrow words from other cultures and decide that tomorrow,
the word the is now spelled t e h, right? And if it wasn't for Microsoft Word
trying to constantly correct you, t e h would probably be an acceptable
spelling right now.
But Internet culture has adopted the word t e h to be something that's
meaningfully different than the. Right? The is something that we know. It's
very boring. T e h, if you use T-E-H in language in the Internet, it's
actually used to describe something derogatory. Right? T e h Internet is
something you look down upon versus the Internet which is something you look up
to. Right? There's little subtle linguistical differences that we're
introducing as a culture by misspellings and by cultural paradigm changes.
So based on the language, we've built books of which the editors came back and
said how are we supposed to edit this book because I don't know how that he is
things are supposed to be spelled?
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: The books are in the back. Two of them based on I Can Has
Cheezburger were best sellers. Somebody asked me at another speech: Why do
people buy these books? You know, that's a great question. You can get them
on line for free. I said, well, you know what? The still a little weird to
take the laptop to the bathroom. That doesn't explain the reason why
[inaudible] best seller. I don't know that that's -- you know, hundreds of
thousands of bathrooms in the United States have got this book in it, I don't
know, but basically, we know that people love the community they've built. And
I say it very specifically. It's the community that they have built. And
because it's a participatory community, they're more like they love it, and I
think that's why they buy these books, because it's a part of who they are.
And of course, can't forget FAIL Blog. FAIL Blog is something we purchased
from a person in London in April of '08. I don't know if you have noticed yet,
but I'm going to use my laser pointer. There's a bicycle. There's the lady
friend. Something's wrong with this banana.
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: It was a pretty small blog that we bought at the time, and it's
grown to be our largest site in the network today. Based on FAIL Blog,
somebody has sent us an e-mail with a video in it. And this was I think I want
to say June or pretty early on. One of our monitors came to me and said how do
we put videos on our site? I'm like, I don't know. Just post it on YouTube.
We'll see what happens. It was kind of like an offhanded thing. We didn't
really think about it. Within 18 months, we became the number one comedy
channel on YouTube. The fifth most watched channel on YouTube of all time.
And now a little over two years later, we've served up more than billion video
views, which makes us one of the largest video distributors in the world. All
because somebody sent us an e-mail and said this is funny. This is my friend
fall on his face. You should post it.
And if you haven't been to FAIL Blog before, these are the type of things that
we post. It's not exactly high brow, right? This isn't like -- not eyebrow,
not high brow.
So this is the kind of stuff that we specialize in, right? Things that are
easy to understand. Not because we think the user is stupid, because people
are busy. People's lives are complicated. And we want to simplify their life
and make them happy. If we brought you, you know, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning
tone on what humor is, I bet you none of you would read it. But if a cat says
something funny, you'll all look at it. That's just the way humanity works.
And I'm going to explain why in a little bit.
So we've built up The Burger Family. These are the first six sites that we've
launched after I Can Has Cheezburger. And we kept on growing and growing,
growing, and now we've got more than 40 sites. And this is one of our latest
successes: Failbooking. It came it came out of FAIL Blog. People kept on
sending funny Facebook-related things to FAIL Blog, and we sat on it for, oh, a
good year and a half. And we said you know what? It's really time for us to
actually start something.
By the way, someone was complaining about getting messages every time somebody
leaves a comment. There's 106 of them so far of people saying something like
exclamation point. That's all they're doing, if you notice. You gotta love
friends.
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: And I'll show you the big numbers. So it took us 23 months from
our start date to reach our first one billion page view milestone. Today it
takes merely three months for us to reach that milestone. The acceleration has
been absolutely phenomenal. We reach about 15 million every month across the
globe. And if you guys -- how many of you are familiar with WordPress? Okay.
It's one of the most popular blogging platforms out there. It may actually be
the most popular today. We account for 12 percent of WordPress.com's traffic
globally. So one out of every -- what is it? Can't do the math. Thank you.
One of those. One of those numbers, pages that you go to WordPress is ours.
It's actually phenomenon. We actually started launching websites without a
actual name on it because we're afraid of failure so we launch some sites like:
There, I fixed it. We launched that without tell anybody that it was ours.
I think yesterday we had changed kind of the logos on there. I fixed it and
then added out cheezburger network branding, and stuff like that. And somebody
tweeted, God, these cheezburger people, they're buying up every blog I like.
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh:
And I tweeted back:
Hey, dude, we started it.
You know?
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh:
That's what I do at night.
24:1. That's a remarkable
for every 25 pages that is
them. The remaining 24 is
You can go get a free blog
I tweet.
number. And this is for every 24 pages that get -served up from our network, we actually host one of
hosted by a third party. It's on WordPress.com.
there. Right? Same platform. Exactly the same.
We use off-the-shelf products as often as we can. And when we starred doing
this, somebody came and told us that, you know, WordPress blogging, it's not
going to scale. It's not a real business. Said, well, I'm not really
interested in a real business. Just kind of like -- I like doing what I'm
doing. I like being in my PJs. I like waking up and commuting, oh, I don't
know, across the fridge.
So -- and I said, that's BS. You
right? And technology can always
nothing inherent in blogging that
know, scaling isn't a function of
you can use. Scaling and growing
Right?
know what? It's a piece of technology,
be adapted. Can always grow. There's
says you can't scale it. And I said, you
technology, because technology is a tool that
is based on how we operate as a business.
So in November of '07, we got an office in lower queen Ann, and the first thing
I did was higher a developer because I said I don't know how to coat. So all
the HTML that you see on the site that looks whacky, thanks, that's me. So I
said, you know, you're going to have to fix this stuff up. And I wanted to
make sure that he wasn't distracted, right, because his time is very valuable.
And I said, you know, I got to figure out a way to make sure that you can do
everything that is value for our business. So I said, don't worry about the
blog. I know that all of our traffic is on at least blogs, but don't worry
about it. Somebody else will take care of it. We're using off-the-shelf
products. There's millions of people using it. If that site goes down, I
don't even have to call WordPress because there's so many who call WordPress on
our behalf saying it's down. We don't need to do that.
So it's -- we've decided, you know, we want to focus on what makes us
different. And I realized that I was the obstacle. I kept on saying you
should do this one moment, do that the other moment. Kept him distracted. I
said, okay, you know, I'll put a plan together. 30 days, tell me what you're
going to do for the next 30 days and I'll let you do it. You don't need me to
come into the office. All right. So I took myself out of the equation because
I had these -- I wanted to grow. I had my pride. I had my ego. I had all
these assumptions about who we were and that made me kind of jump from task to
task and kept on distracting our company. So I wanted to actually leave them
to do what they do best and leave myself out of it.
One of the best things we did was we kept our lazy attitude. Eric, one of the
cofounders of I Can Has Cheezburger, one of the best things he told me was -and I said, you know, why is your site on WordPress? Why is your Lolcat
builder one page? Right? It was like a dot.net page, like a single dot.net
page. He was like, oh, 'cuz it's -- you know, I'm lazy. Like, I don't want to
work 24/7. Like I just want to make the simplest thing. And I think the users
are the same way. So if I make it something easy for them and they can be lazy
too, I think it will all work out. And he was absolutely right.
So the lazy attitude made us focus on the difficult decisions, right? If
you're working 24/7, you tend to go crazy. You tend to do all these little
things and try things out and all that stuff. And when we were small, we said,
you know, well really can't do all those things. We can only do a few things
well. And what are those few things? That's what we focused on.
So from my perspective, I asked the question: What if I wanted to work just
four hours a week and still be successful? What would I need to do? What is
the core value property of this website? And that's what led us to say, you
know, instead of ad hoc posting cats whenever we find them, we'll go to a
schedule. Right? I can literally schedule these out. I can literally
schedule three days in advance and go away. Great. Fantastic. Worked well.
From the user's perspective it was great because if the users had 40 seconds,
what do they want from us? They wanted reliable humor. They wanted to laugh
every time they came to the site. Great. I can give you a schedule into which
at 9:00 a.m., there would be a cat. It would show up. Well, when you get to
your desk at the office, pull up our website.
It increased our traffic so much, it allowed us to do so much more beyond that.
We actually could now do more than just one thing at that time. That's what I
call a beautiful island. Right? Company making tough discussions as to why
they're important to their users and making sure that they're are lines to the
users' decisions of why they come to you in the first place.
So I'm going to give you an example of what I mean by this lazy attitude. This
is the detailed specifications for one of the most highly scaleable popular
image manipulation software on the web, otherwise known as our basic Lolcat
[inaudible]. It allows you to upload an image, in this case a green box, and
add three lines of caption. Line A, line B, and line C. That's all you get.
You can't move the text around. You can't spell check. You can't do anything
but add three lines. You can leave them blank if you would like, but you can
only do three lines of text.
Somebody asked the question: What happens if the caption is too long? Okay.
So we looked at the choices. We could -- I love the fact that it wraps here -auto scale down the font size. Right? If it's too long, we can scale it down.
We could wrap the text. We could warn the user and say [buzz noise], sorry,
your caption is too long. Or the last thing, which was to do absolutely
nothing.
Well, guess what we did. That's what happens if you write something too long.
It just runs off right up the side of the page. Doesn't give you a warning
that it's too long. Doesn't give you a pop-up box. Doesn't wrap. Doesn't
scale down the font size. It just keeps going.
When we were told by our host to get off their server again, there was a folder
with more than a million images in it. It cost us $6 month to host this
service.
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: By the way, if you're in a Windows box and you've got a million
files in one folder, your files, it won't pull up the list. So we spent a
month actually writing a script to move those files off. You end up paying for
this, by the way, in some way, shape, or form, but the fact of the matter is we
could afford to pay for it because the original simplicity worked.
So we kept this attitude, and we found out that human nature has a tendency to
admire complexity. The space shuttle is a wonderful thing, but I'd never buy
it. I'd probably never want to go for a ride. But we reward simplicity.
Right? We buy things that make our lives simpler, but we don't want to buy -we're like, oh, my God, that's such a great piece of engineering, but I don't
want that in my house. We do this all the time. And as business, we tend to
forget why we do that. Oh, yeah, that.
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: It's like the number one most tweeting thing. I actually put this
slide in as a reminder to you guys. So I realized that that meant that
complexity made our business hard to grow. And so we actually went on a
process of rooting out complexity in our company. And the reason we found out
as to why we were making things complex wasn't the users. It's because we
wanted to impress ourselves. I can make that function that much better. I can
make that feature so much cooler. I can do this and that and that. Why? Why
are you wasting my money that I'm paying you with making features that are too
complicated for anyone, because the maintenance costs of such complexity comes
to bite you down the road.
Some people say you can't really avoid complexity, can you? Well, we
introduced a methodology. If anybody can guess MPH. Anyone? Anyone? Any
guesses? All right. I'll make it easy. I'm forced to pause for the audience.
A bunch of little slides that actually give you notes as you're speaking. It's
like I don't have to make sure to remember what happens. It's called
Mr. Potato Head?
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: Why is it called Mr. Potato Head? It applies actually -- this
methodology applies to all of our company, technology, org charts, product
development, IT. We don't have any IT, actually. So that's great. Not to be
confused with redundancy here. We have that too. We have to make sure
everything is doubly redundant.
But MPH says: If a significant component is lost, it will be ugly, but nobody
dies.
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: We run a dot.net infrastructure from top to bottom. When you go
to create a Lolcat, that's built on a Windows stack. It is completely
unrelated to the lamp stack that hosts our WordPress pages. If our entire
server infrastructure for custom code that we've built goes down, the blogs are
completely unaffected. You will not even know this, that anything has happened
unless you click on a link to try to get to the other side. All right.
This is Mr. Potato Head. It's ugly, yes. Maybe some things will have a little
box with a red X in it, but no one actually has a degraded -- majorly degraded
experience. Doesn't bring down the whole network.
The reverse of it is also true. And this is the part that helps us become a
rapidly developing company, is that if a significant component is added, it's
still ugly but everybody lives. We don't add features that break the entire
system. Because we know that our paychecks are paid by the people who view our
websites. And that's the thing that we don't want to touch.
Like if -- actually WordPress.com went down about two days ago. Like the
entire WordPress.com infrastructure went down. But our back end of the
structure hosted here was still up. So what did people do? They moved from
one side of the fence to the other. All right.
This kind of interdependency but without a risk is actually very rare today.
We tend to build really complicated features that if one of them broke,
everything breaks. And I don't know why it actually tends to happen more often
than it should.
So in order to do this, we actually have a philosophy of finding forgettable
partners. Forgettable in a good sense, meaning we host with WordPress. Guess
what. If WordPress goes down, I didn't send them an e-mail saying, hey, you
guys are down. Somebody else did. We didn't have to worry about them. Right?
Like Skype. We use Skype for all of our phone calls and chatting. I don't
need to tell Skype their server is down. Somebody else will. We don't have to
worry about these guys. Azure, same thing. We're a business partner. We work
with Azure. Guess what. If Azure goes down, I'm not worried. It will be
back. All right?
These are the type of partners you want because you don't have time to look out
for their best interests. You are only looking out for your business focus.
And that allowed us to free up our development time so that we can spend 90
percent of it on the core technology, which is the creation of accounts, of
pictures, of floating, of hosting and management, and the remaining ten percent
to just kind of work with the off-the-shelf technology.
So when did you Mr. Potato Head your business? If you can plug in or out a
better, cheaper, faster solution, that's when you do it. We decided that we
are actually a publisher not in the business of publishing. We're a publisher
in the business of creating community, which meant that we could outsource our
publishing platform to WordPress. All right?
And one final lesson we've learned from that is that the old adage was try
before you buy. Well, thanks to cod computing and the lower costs of
technology, we can actually prove the methodology before we actually spend any
money. If a partner comes to us and says we'd like for you to use our video
hosting system, my initial response is: How can I pay you nothing until I can
make a profit and then pay you something?
We use individual [inaudible] for our hosting technology. We don't -- we serve
millions and millions and millions of video every month and we don't pay them a
dime. All right. We took absolutely no risk in that deal, and they were more
than happy to take it because it could quadruple that are network size.
So that's me. If you have any questions, feel free. And these are some of our
new websites. ArtofTrolling just launched, self launched yesterday. And
MustHaveCute, if you guys are looking at -- if you guys know the word
ka-wee-zee [phonetic], really cute little products, a site for that. So that's
it.
[applause]
>> Ben Huh:
>>:
I'm more than happy to answer any questions you guys have.
Yes?
I remember you said you bought FAIL Blog and it was really slow --
>> Ben Huh:
Yeah.
>>: -- not big. Was that -- like what changes did you make to it to make it
bigger or do you know it was going to grow big anyway?
>> Ben Huh: FAIL Blog we bought because it was -- I liked it. I thought it
was pretty funny. The guy who ran it was an IT consultant. He was traveling
all across the world. He wouldn't update it on a regular basis. And so when
we bought it, we said let's update it on a regular basis and let's post stuff
that we found was funny.
The first couple months it was pretty rough actually. We posted some pictures
that the community really didn't like. They thought it was offensive. Well,
that's okay. It's comedy. It's humor. You're supposed to offend a few
people.
And then we got really lucky because the financial crisis happened and the
banks started failing. And there's this famous photo of this woman in a
congressional hearing just holding up a sign that says fail. And it was like
it ran all over the papers. And then like the search results for fail, like
the number of searches for fail went up which makes me wonder why the hell are
you searching the word fail? But yeah, that's how we really got our break.
Thank you. Demon brothers. Yes?
>>:
How do you deal with competitors [inaudible]?
>> Ben Huh: Yes. Varied entry is virtually zero. You can actually -- Betsy
here can actually start a new blog right now as I'm talking. Right. There's
virtually zero varied entry. What the barrier is is the community. You have
to find this community of people that will love you and interact with you and
actually give you content.
We get 13,000 pieces of content every single day. All right. That's an
enormous advantage that we have over the next person. And we see competitors
all the time that pop up. But that's okay. The Internet is a big wide place.
So . . .
Yes?
>>: Is it when you're going from your site to, say, a published book, is the
content licensing a big headache then?
>> Ben Huh: Yeah. The content licensing to go from Internet to anything off
Internet is actually a big deal. We have to actually go paper and pull the
rights. So we have personally contacted every single person whose photo
appears in our books. Yeah. Because you can't go to their house and take out
their page when you realize it's not yours. Yes?
>>: How much of your traffic on new sites do you attribute to the network
effect, people that would go to the old one and then ->> Ben Huh:
>>:
Yeah.
-- [inaudible].
>> Ben Huh: That's a great question. You know, what percentage of our growth
comes from the network effect weapon we add new sites. When do they know that
it's ours and how do they grow?
We actually don't have great analytics. I know it seems like heresy to say
that in this day and age. We use very simple analytic programs. We use Google
analytics. We use stat counter. We use Quantcast. But it's just -- we don't
really know what to do with that information, so we kind of now how we're
doing. We keep score. Right? Well, we are barely learning how people
interact between our sites.
We didn't realize that we actually serve up a billion views of video until
somebody asked us and then we actually went and looked. Right? It doesn't
really matter at some point because I know that our core business is to make
people happy. That has very little to do with metrics. And I think sometimes
we lose ourselves in metrics. There's too many numbers out there. And
sometimes you can sit there and look at cool numbers all day long and actually
not do any work.
So we rely on very simple things like the number of votes on a picture. Number
of people favorited an item. Like those things have meaning, so we try to
concentrate on those.
We actually do want to get better at analytics. It's something
actually hired someone to do in-house, but because we're small,
that trade-off of where can we be lazy. And so we kind of said
should be put aside here for now. Yeah. I'm going to skip you
Yeah.
>>:
[inaudible] kind of a follow-up.
>> Ben Huh:
>>:
that we have
we had to make
conventionalism
for a second.
Yeah.
So are you guys doing anything with key words to discover opportunities?
>> Ben Huh: Are we doing anything with key words to discover opportunities.
Yes and no, and I'll describe it this way: We wanted to launch a cute animal
blog. Cute overload, well respected, Meg Frost. She's a UX designer at Apple.
She's brilliant. There's no way for me to compete with her. She's been there
for like ten years.
So we said how do we attach our self to an Internet phrase like, you know, for
example, cheezburger is something that we actually help promote. The word
photo bomb is a word that we actually help promote to describe when somebody
jumps in your photo. Fail, same thing. Nomenclature and language is a big
part of what we do. We said, you know, how do we find a word that actually
describes cute but not saying cute because Meg pretty much owns the word cute
on the Internet.
So we found the word squee, S-Q-U-E-E. It's actually pronounced squee.
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: Proper pronunciation. So we said let's use that. So we bought a
domain neighbor called Daily Squee. So it kind of go back and forth. We find
a word to fit the purpose, not the other way around. Yeah.
>>: If you are relying heavily on user-generated rather than doing it all
yourselves, part one of my question was: When you first start with your own
in-house content and then [inaudible] up for input from the community?
>> Ben Huh: Yeah. So there's a reason why we start the dog site right after
the cat site. It's because when you run a cat site, people send you dog
photos.
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: And then giraffes and aardvarks. We actually -- funny side note.
We outsourced the screening of pictures like to make sure the not like, you
know, naked people versus cats overseas to a company in Vietnam. And there's a
little tagging so we ask: Is this a cat? Is this a dog? Is this a person?
What have you.
We kept on getting results back that would categorize a small dog as a cat.
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: And I was like, I don't understand what the -- like the pretty
obvious to me that's a papillon. That's not a cat. I mean, I know it's
cat-like, but it's small. Turns out in Vietnam, culturally speaking, they
don't have a lot of small pets. So when they see a small dog, they just
weren't used to it. Like, oh, wow, didn't realize that's kind of a
developed-world phenomenon of owning small dogs. So anyway. What was your
question again?
[laughter]
>>: Just the ->> Ben Huh:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
>>:
-- difference between self-generated content --
>> Ben Huh:
>>:
Right.
-- and [inaudible] generated.
>> Ben Huh: So that's -- we developed the dog site because we got dog photos
from the cat site. Right. We developed there I fixed it with bad home made
fix-up jobs because they kept on sending it to FAIL Blog. So it kind of leads
kind of one to the other. You have to start with good content actually
encourage the community to give you good content. So yeah. We seed content
from other blogs.
>>: And then the second part of my question was, and I think you sort of
answered it, was the censorship [inaudible] oversees [inaudible]?
>> Ben Huh: No, actually we brought it back to the United States because of
that problem. So we -[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: Thank you little dogs.
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: So we've got people throughout the country and they spend
basically six-hour shifts going through and making sure that the photos are
appropriate and they conform to the terms of service. So yeah. We that one
in-house now. Yes?
>>:
So what's the revenue model?
>> Ben Huh: The revenue model. The vast majority of our revenues come from
advertising today. And the other two portions are publishing and licensing
from the books and also merchandise. We actually have a internet culture
T-shirt store which is called LOLmart, LOLmartshirts.com. Basically it's like
shirt dot [inaudible] if you're familiar with that. We post a new design every
day. It's something to do with Internet culture and then people buy it. So
yeah.
>>:
I was just wondering how many people are on your team.
>> Ben Huh: There are, at last count, 35 of us on the team. Seem like a lot
of people to run a cat blog. But yeah, there's actually 35 of us. And we are
currently -- we have a 1500-square foot office, which I believe is a little bit
smaller than the room that we're in, and there's 30-some people working in it.
So we all work on a two-foot-by-four-foot folding table. Everybody gets a
folding table, including myself. No one has offices, and we like just have a
big pit. And we decided that we had to move because A, obviously we were
moving out of space to put people, and then B, somebody plugged in a water
heater to the outlet, and it took that entire row of extension cords. So like,
all right, the time to move. So yeah.
>>:
How do you juggle the good content to the top?
>> Ben Huh: Excellent question. How do we know the good from the bad? So
either I can tell you I think it's funny, right, the traditional publishing
[inaudible]. I'm an editor. I have a degree, ergo, I am God. Or we could ask
you. Right?
So what we did was after the screeners look at the content, we put the voting
back on to the user base and say thank you for submitting your content. Now
tell me if you think that the other stuff is funny.
So not only do we not create our own content, we also do not make judgments on
the quality of the content that you send in. All right. It's -- God, I love
the Internet.
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: Our users who send in the content do the work of filtering them.
Right. I mean, it's like an amazing paradigm. Like it used to be that that
have unthinkable. Right? Why would anyone send you anything other than a
letter to the editor. Right? And why would you let other people vote up the
best letter to the editor? That's crazy. That's our job. No, actually our
job is to create the community that loves the content and to make sure that
they're having a good time. You know, we didn't want to make those [inaudible]
judgments. Yes, back there.
>>:
Do you have an exit strategy or is it just too much?
>> Ben Huh: Do I have an exit strategy? I don't want to exit. It's one of
those things where like you find a calling in life. You know, you're born,
your parents tell you you have a destiny.
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: Right? Well, like, what's my destiny? I went to Northwestern
University, got a degree in journalism. I graduated 1999 and went to work for
a dot-com. All my friend thought they were so clever when they stayed with
newspapers when the dot-com first happened. Now who's laughing?
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: It only took ten years. I don't want to exit. It's kind of fun.
You know, I -- there's a great team ever people that we work with. We talk
about Internet culture. I feel like -- I feel like the 1950s all over again
when TV came into popular culture and changed everything. That's where we
stand today when it comes to Internet. The Internet is not only developing
culture of its own and it's spreading throughout the world, not just the United
States. We happen to live in a country where freedom of speech really enables
us to experiment with pushing the limits of what content is acceptable and how
content should be created.
There was a rule yesterday. Three Google executives were convicted in Italy
because Google video posted a mentally handicapped kid getting beat up by some
people. And the courts in Italy decided that that was Google's fault.
That doesn't happen in this country. That's very, very important today.
Because without that kind of protection, right, it's not a great thing to
publicize the fact that somebody got beat up, but what makes Google's posting
of the video any more different than a news showing it? Right? And that's
kind of the parochial view of information, that it's bad. Well, it's
absolutely not true because the moment you believe that information is bad,
that's the moment you decide that humanity cannot make a judgment by itself.
Information is a tool for humanity to decide what is good and what is wrong.
Right? And if you take that away from us, society suffers. Yeah?
>>:
[inaudible] wanted to know if you have a cat.
>> Ben Huh: I do not have a cat. I'm actually allergic to cats.
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: I have a dog that would be classified as a cat in Vietnam.
[laughter]
>>: [inaudible].
>> Ben Huh: Yeah. Short answer, no. I'm going to find that cat -- one out of
20,000 cats don't have the dander allergen, and I'm looking for that cat, but
unfortunately when you go to the shelter, there's so much dander, you can't
figure out which one is which, so. Yes?
>>: You mentioned [inaudible] briefly when you were talking about [inaudible],
but your revenue model?
>> Ben Huh:
Yeah.
>>: So is it -- you guys just ad based and then people just buying stuff?
What's the breakdown for ->> Ben Huh: Yeah. That's about it. We're about like 70, 75 percent ad-based.
That's the bulk of our revenue. So like when January 2009 came along, like it
was like the end of the world. I don't know if you heard, but like, you know,
venture capital firms were sending out big giant memos to their companies
saying lay off everybody except yourself because the world is coming to an end.
You know, we saw all those forecasts.
Luckily for us, being on the Internet, we bounce back very, very quickly.
Yeah, it was horrific to watch the revenue drop from December to January. It
was literally like holy crap, we're going to disappear. The cat business is
over. But it wasn't. It actually bounced back very quickly by April. The
Internet is surprisingly resilient. Yeah.
>>: So with some 40 networks in your site, obviously you're working to kind of
ride the wave of coming Internet [inaudible]. Are you seeing some of the sites
kind of fall out of favor as perhaps [inaudible] fall out of public
consciousness?
>> Ben Huh: Yeah. I actually haven't seen that. One of the remarkable things
as to why people show up here to listen to me is that the phenomenon of I Can
Has Cheezburger has been around for more than three years now. All right?
It's remarkably long-lasting for the Internet [inaudible]. Our attention spans
are very short.
November of '07, just right after I started, People Magazine called and said
we'd like to feature you in our magazine. I said, great, what is it for? Top
fads of 2007. I said no thanks. I will not give you any photos. I was so
afraid of this being a fad that I would give up being in People Magazine,
right, which would drive tons of traffic. And actually, it's a philosophy that
we've held on to today which is we don't start websites if we don't think it
will last. If it doesn't tie itself back to something that we hold as a core
of humanity. For example, Lovely Listing. Singular, Lovely Listing, which is
a blog about horrible real estate ads. That's part of America.
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: There's nothing we love more than to make fun of our neighbors'
houses. Right? Yes, we will do a blog around that subject, but we will not do
a blog around other things such as Faye Willisey [phonetic] quoted in Wired
Magazine, a site about dogs humping things. All right. That's a one note
joke. Ever seen a dog hump something? You've seen it a million times. So.
Yes?
>>: Related to that, do you keep close track of forums like 4-10 [inaudible]
or are you mostly self-contained?
>> Ben Huh: We're mostly self-contained. I visit 4-10 on a regular basis just
because I think it's funny. Also kind of mind boggling at the same time. I go
there because I like it. I don't go there for business anymore. Right?
To be honest, I didn't start I Can Has Cheezburger. Somebody else did. When
they actually found the Lolcat photos on line, they actually didn't know about
4-10 until afterwards. So what had happened was 4-10 served as a breeding
ground for these names, and once they leave 4-10, it became more acceptable for
other people to participate, because 4-10 is such a hard place to live in.
So most of name creation today is actually done outside of 4-10. Right? The
practice of creating names. An idea that is transmitted from person to person
virally has actually left 4-10, which is to their incredible credit because
it's an amazing community. So. Anyone else? I saw a hand back there once.
Yeah?
>>: I was just going to ask along the same lines, you mentioned earlier that
the Internet is a great place [inaudible] every day [inaudible] and something
awful. [inaudible].
>> Ben Huh:
>>:
That's right.
Do you think that you might perhaps [inaudible] content action?
>> Ben Huh: Yeah, you know, it happens all the time. People get upset. You
know, we've got a feud with another Facebook-based site, and they're like you
stole our idea. And I'm like, guess what, you can't own this idea. The idea
of somebody making a mistake on Facebook, you can't own that. Right? I'm
sorry. It's just not doable. And if you really think that you own that idea,
that's a disconnect between reality and where you are. Right? We don't own
the ideas that live on our sites. We do not own the idea that we create. Like
literally there's a law that prevents that. Right? You can protect and
expression of an idea or trademarks of an idea, but you cannot own an idea
itself. That's actually one of the reasons why humanity progresses is that we
are free to share ideas without having to worry about who owns it. So yeah,
back there.
>>:
On that same note, what about specific photos?
[inaudible]?
>> Ben Huh: Yeah, we do. Occasionally we have people who would ask us, hey,
that the my photo, somebody used it without my permission, and we take it down.
So yeah. Yup?
>>: Everything that you've said makes me believe that you kind of are in this
charmed place. Like you go from your gut, you don't do that much analytics,
you're having a great time. God bless you, you know. I love going to the site
in packet because I'm an editor and God, and I loathe to see the little people
mess up.
>> Ben Huh: Yeah.
[laughter]
>>: But, you know, I want to know if you feel like what you have done has any
sensible repeatable formula and if there's one take-away in what you've said to
us today that might contribute to that repeatable formula.
>> Ben Huh:
>>:
Sure.
Or is it screw you, you're just not as gold as I am?
>> Ben Huh: No. It's an absolutely repeatable formula. And it's actually a
formula we've known for ages. Good content. Content is king. That's really
what it comes down to. All right? Like you as editors actually -- so let
me -- I'm not kissing your ass but let me go through this part.
We just hired an editor out of AOL New York. We didn't hire a writer, right,
who could actually work on a blog. We hired an editor. Why? The
proliferation of technology for publishing means that there's more content
today than ever before. In fact, the amount of content that users create today
dwarfs any professionally created content. So that actually increase the value
of good editing. Right? If you can't tell the difference between good and
bad, that's a big problem for us. Right?
So editors are more valuable today than ever before whereas writers who do not
have a specific skill set become commodity. And that the what the happened in
newspaper journalism is that reporting about your, you know, local angle of a
national event no longer has appeal. So that's been the erosion of that
market.
So this action is absolutely repeatable. We've proven it internally ourselves.
And you can take the same formula and focus on the content, and if you do it
consistently, people will flock to you and grow. There's really no magic to
it.
Somebody was doing a paper on our company, which I felt was pretty funny and
kind of useless. And they were tweeting about the fact that they were doing
this paper, and then she started getting more and more frustrated. And the
last thing I read was: They're doing nothing different or original. I don't
understand.
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: And that's absolutely correct. We are doing nothing original or
novel. And maybe that is the novelty in and of itself.
You look at our company. We ask people to send in their photos. We ask people
to help us choose the best ones, and we post them. It's incredibly simple.
There's no patentable technology that we've built so far. At least not that I
know of. All right. But a whole business is based on the community, which is
something that's radically different than traditional publishing. Yeah?
>>:
[inaudible]?
>> Ben Huh: Yeah, there's a lot of companies mimicking our business model, you
know, creating a bunch of blog-based sites and a bunch of mean-based sites and
things like that. I don't know of many successful ones so far. But I would
imagine it's going to happen sooner or later because again, the model is not
that hard to replicate. It's just that the execution is incredibly difficult.
>>:
[inaudible] revenue model?
>> Ben Huh:
>>:
Yeah.
So you have this [inaudible]?
>> Ben Huh: Yeah. People coming from new sites, old sites, actually, we don't
know that information. Our analytics is too simple for us to know that. We
just do know it goes up and to the right. That's what's important for now.
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: Sorry. I wish I knew because actually that would actually help
us. Yeah. Actually somebody -- yeah?
>>: So are you -- I wasn't exactly sure, are you guys internationalizing your
sites?
>> Ben Huh: No, the question is, are the competitors, especially
internationally and things like that. Probably. But --
>>:
[inaudible]?
>> Ben Huh: Right now, our business model basically makes it very difficult
for us to go overseas because we're ad-based and that means that the ad markets
overseas do not fund the development of such efforts. 40 percent of our
traffic is internationally, and we do modify some of that, but we mostly cater
to English-speaking cultures. Yeah?
>>: So you have a page out of Facebook [inaudible] additional channels such as
that, how does that affect [inaudible] traffic?
>> Ben Huh: So our communities and pages out of Facebook, YouTube and things
like that, how have they affected traffic. Anecdotally, they subject that that
actually helps the community. We actually don't know for sure. I will give
you an example though. We have one of the largest channels on YouTube which is
an external community. They don't actually have to leave YouTube to come to
our site. We have a high traffic month or week in YouTube, we actually see a
correlation on our site.
in the way back. Yeah.
So it serves as a marketing vehicle.
Yeah.
Somebody
>>: You mentioned that you don't have a particular exit strategy. Do you have
any grand visions where you'll be in five years. You said you're doing video
now [inaudible] television, maybe something else.
>> Ben Huh: I'd love to be in television. I've gone into LA a few times, but
that's just a world I don't really understand. They seem kind of crazy to me.
But that's okay. I come from the Internet; I'm sure I seem pretty crazy to
them.
We try to stick to a very agile formula, literally from a technology standpoint
as well. We plan 30 days out, and we try to execute everything in those
30 days. And whatever we didn't finish, we'll finish and we move on to the
next one.
The market seems to be so fluid that having a five-year plan seems kind of a
waste of our time. So we're just going to keep our noses to the ground and see
how quickly it can go. Yeah. Yes?
>>:
[inaudible].
>> Ben Huh: So the structure of our development team is there's CTO. And
there's four developers, one UNIX person. And that was last month. This month
there's still a CTO. Five developers. Three -- wait, one -- I don't know.
They're like two UNIX people sort of, and then two PMs and an intern. Yeah.
It's very fluid. Again, the just one of those things that we're not sure which
way we're going yet so we're going to figure it out. We're just trying to find
the best talented people we can find and put them in a room and see what they
come up with.
And you know, I don't mean to sound kind of flippant about the things I say. I
really learned from my mistakes in the first dot-com bubble when I went in and
said I have a master vision and I'm going to rule the market with this product
and I have so off the market it wasn't even funny. So I wanted to kind of do
this -- this time around do it without those blinders on and that's why I want
to listen to the people who work at the company and say what have you learned
in your experience? I want to listen to the users so the things that we build
into our core value is listening to our users. There's a reason why they're a
million ways to interact with the content on our site by sharing with other
people, by rating it, by adding it to your favorites because that's a data
point for us to understand what the market wants from us. So that's why. And
that's why deep analytics doesn't really matter because at some point, when you
fragment your audience in such tiny groups, you end up with statistically
inaccurate information. So we like the aggregate. We like the statistics that
we can certainly believe in. Yeah. Yes?
>>: So my [inaudible] apologies to everybody, but does the company as a whole
support any causes?
>> Ben Huh: Does the company -- yes, we do. Yeah, we work with the Seattle
Humane Society, so when we do local events, with he try to benefit them if we
can, yeah.
>>:
[inaudible]?
>> Ben Huh: Do we do [inaudible]?
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: Our CTO likes to go to conferences and people ask what you do
because they don't know that there's an entire technology behind it, likes to
say he develops the robots that takes the photos of the cats by chasing them.
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: And there's that moment where everybody is like, is that really
true?
[laughter]
>> Ben Huh: So anyway, looks like my time is up. Thank you.
[applause]