Thursday, January 28, 2010

I Can Has Unhealthy Obzezzion Wit Kittehs

Do you have things you obsess over? Perhaps things like shoes, tiny collectibles or boy bands? I too have an obsession........

......an obsession with CATS.

Ironically, I'm not a huge cat person. They're alright from time to time. Of course they'll give you the time of day when they want to. When it's "convenient" for them (they're rather selfish in my opinion).

No, my obsession started from a little thing called ICanHasCheezburger. LOLCats are the culprit for my obsession.

How can you not like this............





..............and this...............





















...........or this????





















As you can see, ICanHasCheezburger features silly pictures of cats with silly captions. Who would of thought that this hilarious site and its sister site, Fail Blog, would have nearly 50 million page views a month (self reported for the network), and over 1 million unique visitors for ICanHasCheezeburger.com (according to Compete.com statistics). *(Data from 2009)

In other words, serious $$cha-ching$$ potential. 

Ben Huh, CEO of the CheezBurger network, explained in a past Inc. article that they have a simple company mission: “making everyone happy for 5 minutes a day.”

Of course, ICanHasCheezburger wasn't a success overnight. It took alot of followers to ignite the flame but it soon spread like wildfire. As the network grew larger so did the launch of new sites. The cool thing about each site is that each pertains to a different niche audience based on their interests.

Here's a list of a few of their other sites:


So how do they get the ideas for these radical sites? Interestingly, it's the users who are the brains behind these sites and they submit more than 10 thousand submissions of content a DAY.

I believe that the Cheezburger network is a great example of a growing trend in business models - one that focuses on the consumer and builds from customer feedback, recommendations, and interactions.

So yes, because of LOLCats I can't help but imagine a cat in some ridiculous pose with some outrageous caption from every kitteh I see. Thus the reason why I just want to squeeze every kitty to death.

I Can Has Unhealthy Obzezzion Wit Kittehs?


What do you think the future holds for user-inspired content?

Do you think more companies will adopt this type of model?

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