Name: Ben Huh
Website: ICanHasCheezburger.com
Location: Seattle
There’s no use in padding his job description: Ben Huh posts cat pictures on the internet. Or more accurately, he gets other people to post cat pictures on the internet.
Why would someone with a journalism degree from Northwestern spend his days running a cat photo blog?
Simple.
No. 1: It makes people happy.
No. 2: It’s a commercial dream.
The site is I Can Has Cheezburger and it’s a cultural phenomenon that has fans of all ages submitting “lolz,” digital photos of funny cats (“lolcats”) with funny captions. Users type in “lolspeak,” a grammatically-incorrect, baby-talk-like “Engrish” dialect. (For the uninitiated, LOL is the web abbreviation for “laughing out loud.”)
“It seems kind of strange when you describe it in words,” says Huh, the CEO of the Seattle-based company Pet Holdings Inc., a network of eight websites anchored by ICHC.
Indeed. But perhaps the numbers speak more clearly.
“Let’s see,” he says, pulling up the latest statistics on his computer. “Yesterday was a pretty good day. We did 4.9 million page views across the entire network. I Can Has Cheezburger did 1.8 million, or something like that.” That’s a lot of laughter.
A little more than a year ago, Huh, 30, purchased the site from its founders, Hawaii-based Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami. Shortly after ICHC launched in early 2007, the pair was drowning in submissions, and could barely maintain the work flow. Huh came to the rescue. “I thought it made for a good entertainment site and it had a very, very good community around it,” says the Korea-born entrepreneur who had immersed himself in startups during the dot-com days.
Currently, his other sites — all acquired and all sort of weird — include TotallyLooksLike.com, which compares celebrity faces to other people and non-humans (example: “John Kerry Totally Looks Like Guy Smiley from Sesame Street”), Failblog.org, which features user-submitted pictures and videos ofpeople “failing at life,” and IHasAHotDog.com, the ICHC equivalent for canines.
For the record, Huh says, none of his own lolz have ever made the homepage, which has a lineup that’s decided solely by user votes.
Also for the record, Huh is allergic to cats.
“There’s not enough irony in the world,” says Huh, who lives with his wife Emily and dog Nemo. “But I really like cats. This is my way of living vicariously.”
As CEO, Huh spends his days managing 15 employees, doing press interviews, serving on tech panels while wearing his infamous cheezburger hat, and “filling in the cracks.” “Every day is different from the next, but the common theme is that we want to grow and we want to continue to be profitable,” he says. Which isn’t always easy. The ads that the company relies on have recently been hit by the slowing economy.
For Huh, the effort has been worth it.
See No. 1.
“For the vast majority of people, it’s five minutes of happiness,” Huh says. “It’s five minutes of their day they can spend forgetting life’s troubles. My job is to figure out how to make more people laugh for longer periods of time. It’s nothing noble, but it certainly makes me take pride in what I do.”
