Ben Huh is usually holed up in his Seattle-based company Pet Holdings Inc—better known as the company that brings you I Can Has Cheezburger?
, the FAIL Blog and nearly thirty other sites that aim to make you laugh for five minutes every day. But he’s down in the Bay Area this week to promote the launch of three new books “How to Take over the World: A LOLCat Guide 2 Winning,” “Graph out Loud,” based on GraphJam and “FAIL Nation: A Visual Romp through the World of Epic Fails.” A big party is happening tonight.
Annoyingly, Huh is also running around San Francisco this week doing all kinds of media interviews. But here are some things I pried out of him yesterday that you may not know.
A word first about Huh: People almost always open an interview by asking if he has cats or if he’s always been funny, which misses the point of what he loves about his job. Huh is a businessman. Unlike a lot of media entrepreneurs, he says his job has become more fun the larger the staff, the site, and the operational worries have grown.
People frequently forget that Huh actually acquired I Can Has Cheezburger? and the FAIL Blog—he didn’t start them. (More on that purchase price below…) Since then he’s opened dozens of humor sites, about 50% of which fail, but some grow spectacularly fast, proving that LOLCats wasn’t a fluke and that Huh has an eye for what makes something funny in that specific viral sort of Internet way. Right now, he’s got a spreadsheet of 150 ideas that he’s moving around, honing and assigning to a team of writers who each curate about five blogs each.
Simply put, Huh has built a serious company out of something inherently hard to take seriously. As he frequently says, it shouldn’t work, but it does.
Now, some details I pried out of Huh with the allure of coffee and a breakfast sandwich yesterday:
1. That I Can Has Cheezburger? purchase price was probably lower than the $2 million Time and others (ahem) reported. Huh is unflappably mum on what he spent, but he’s too good a business man to have ponied up that much—even as fast as the profitable site was growing. Plus, regulatory filings show his angel round he raised to buy that blog and build a company around it was just $2.25 million. When I asked why he’d spend almost the entire amount on one acquisition, he didn’t so much nod, answer or agree as make a face that said “Yes, thank you for not assuming I’m a total idiot.” But, yeah, he won’t comment.
2. Huh has really studied what makes humor catch and made an interesting observation: Male sites and female sites grow distinctly differently. Men tend to share by gut instinct, so male oriented sites grow faster but can churn users quickly too. Women are more trust-oriented, says Huh. That means they share links and sites less frequently, but with more credibility. So the sites grow slower but maintain their audiences better.
It’s an interesting observation given how much of the early breakout Web 2.0 were so male dominated, and Huh should know seeing the traffic patterns of Hawtness (slightly NSFW) and LovelyListing. (Guess which one is for men?)
For the record I Can Has Cheezburger? is about 50%-50% male-female, but nearly 100% geeks-who-love-cats, both of which have aided huge and sustained growth. As Huh explains it, dog people go to parks, cat people sit inside on computers.
3. Just how good that traffic is. The Pet Holdings Network boasts 12 million uniques a month and does 1 billion page views every four months. Those numbers are astounding for a 26-person, user generated content company built largely on frivolity.
We all know about Cheezburger, which surpassed 1 billion page views last month. But FAIL blog went from zero to 10 million page views-per-month in just 90 days, and the recently launched ThereIFixedIt.com has matched that pace.
That said, Huh doesn’t hugely care how fast a blog grows, as long as it grows. What gets one of his sites shut down is a huge spike and then a fall.
His newest site, NotVeryTalented.com launches on Friday.
4. Revenues. Huh has done a great job making money in tough industries. While a lot of blogs are sputtering, his have 30% margins, posting CPMs anywhere between 15 cents and $8. The least profitable is clearly Hawtness, which Huh doesn’t even try to sell ads on, given the dodgy inventory. “It just hooks in readers,” he says.
Here’s the shocker: The company also makes 30% margins from book publishing deals, and advances and royalties make up nearly a third of the company’s revenues, which are in the “single digit millions.” More shocking: Huh can’t seem to get a publisher to sign him to a multi-book deal. This despite the fact that the first LOLcats book spent 13 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. Really, New York publishing houses?
Huh plans on releasing six books next year and – SPOILER ALERT- the third LOLCats book will be all about kittens.
5. Huh has a social network too. Even if you knew all of the above, this one must surprise you because it recently surprised Huh. Pet Holdings has long offered a log-in and profile for contributors who regularly post images and passively given them the ability to friend each other. The result? A niche social network with 1.3 million users. Huh hasn’t quite decided what to do with this revelation, but he’s thinking about it. As comparatively well as he’s done with blog ads and book sales, to really scale the company, he’d like a sexier revenue stream that can grow fast without massively growing content.
| Location: | Seattle, Washington, United States |
| Funding: | $2M |
Pet Holdings, Inc. is the parent and holding company for:
FailBlog and EngrishFunny
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I’m working on a website that’s going to be the next lolcats. You heard it here first. (TechCunch comments exclusive?).
It is a nice mixture of pop culture humor/internet time waster, and in some early testing was generating 25 pageviews per visitor.
I plan on passively generating revenue via bulk banner ads and CPA relationships with Amazon, Netflix, and others. RPU will be low but it’ll still make $ through sheer volume. Basically, just like the lolcats network.
You rule Ben! Don’t worry – the copycats won’t make it.
ishatmypants.com
Love stories about web guys who have built a solid business. I know it’s not quite as catchy as something like Twitter, but Huh’s created something I really enjoy, and he makes a good living off it.
Huh created? Huh created NOTHING.
We nevar 4get, we nevar 4give.
I don’t think OhJohnny who you were replying to was referring to Huh creating the content, he was referring to Huh creating the business.
And from that perspective it appears he’s done an excellent job!
“We nevar 4get, we nevar 4give.”
Anon FAIL. You got it backwards.
just a guy combing material and posting other peoples’ work, including many youtube videos I posted myself. i can has royalties?
Youtube allows it, you can stop your videos from going viral, in the youtube upload page…
You put your vid up for the world to see, its not his fault you failed.org to make money from it.
Now this I am really impressed with.
This guy feels the pulse of the lolcats internet and has definitely been able to capitalize. I give him all sorts of hawt respect.
Better than lots of other crap
all of the “growth” is just pumping existing users into the new sites.
still more eyes looking at more ads.
same eyes, looking at the same ads, instead of making a single site with a bunch of categories, he is just making a bunch of websites. The only reason for that is to say: “We have 12 million people across our network” when in reality it’s the same 1 million people who just go and visit the secondary sites that get pumped all over the place
i’m not sure, for example i visit only two of them.
Fun fact: He bought the I Can Haz Cheeseburger site over IM. Learned this from his talk at Google DC a couple weeks ago: http://www.russ...k-with-ben-huh/
The author forgot the mention that this man is profiting off of a lot of memes that originated (and were a lot more funnier) on 4chan. He is no different from that eBaumns scumbag.
Bitter much?
so is http://www.lolnudz.com/
worth at least $500
I thought I read this exact same article in FastCompany this month.
http://www.fast...as-media-empire
Just another person, ala Ebaums, ala Collegehumor, ala *.comedy.com websites that take UGC from /b/ from SomethingAwful, from General Mayhem and take it to the masses for big profit.
Lame.
Erik Bauman, Josh Abramson, Ricky Van Veen, Jakob Lodwick, Zach Klein – pay Lowtax and Sanjay for what you stole and sold.
I saw an interview with Ben and found many other things about him fascinating as well. Like Jason Calacanis and so many other entrepreneurs, he first experienced great (somewhat traumatic) failure before hitting it big. Calacanis was offered 20 million, turned it down, and then watched in horror as his first company popped. Huh ran a consulting business that failed due to bad market timing. Probably as a direct result of their initial miscues, Calacanis and Huh went on to achieve extraordinary success.
What I find the most interesting is that Pet Holdings is basically a factory. They launch a blog a week, keep the winners and then cut their losses. Beneath its veneer of comedy, Pet Holdings operates like a never-ending science project.
The unsaid sixth thing that may shock an individual is that LOLCats and its offshoots aren’t funny. The people claiming such things were funnier when they were contained to sites like Something Awful or 4Chan are also mistaken.
notverytalented.com is up…and not very interesting so far. it’s all videos and most are 3 to 4 mins long.
short, sweet, and move to the next one. notverytalented is notveryinteresting