LOLcats Goes Commercial; also conducts leveraged buyout of Wachovia Bank (genghis)

(note: I re-did the title of this post, which is a no-no, but the original didn't make much sense)

Oh hai! We can haz money?

Yep. It’s come down to this. Welcome to the new economy.

”When you LOL at silly pictures of cats with even sillier captions, Ben Huh laughs all the way to the bank.”
“For the uninitiated, that's Web shorthand for "laugh out loud," an abbreviation that is common in e-mails, instant messages and online chat rooms. Huh, a Seattle entrepreneur, has built a mini-empire on the unique brand of humor illustrated by the "LOLcats" craze: photos with captions punctuated by deliberately misspelled words and mangled phrases.”

Let’s continue, shall we?

”Since buying I Can Has Cheezburger, Huh has added companion sites devoted to dogs, politics and really bad translations of English, among others. A fan favorite is Fail Blog, in which people take joy in others' mishaps.”

”Still, investors are betting more than $2 million that the company, which Huh says breaks even, has staying power.
"Humor is one of those things that is recession-proof," said investor Geoff Entress.
But he says Huh and his team still face a major challenge: continuing to tickle funny bones in different ways so users and advertisers keep coming back for more.
Ada Courtney, 43, a self-described domestic goddess with four cats and two dogs from Rapid City, S.D., made her first Cheezburger entry a year ago. Since then she has added more than 1,100. Her cat captions have hit the front page five times and her dog captions six.
"When I first started looking through the site, I was thinking, 'Good Lord, do these people need lives?' " Courtney said. "Now I see the total attraction of it. It's one of the most wonderful things I have ever done."”

We. Are. Fucking. Doomed.

Fail.

Also, if interested you can still contribute to the LOLcat Bible translation project.

posted by xgenghisx at 05:02 AM

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