Sites like I Can Has Cheezburger, Fail Blog, and The Daily What may seem frivolous (because, well, they are), but theya4‚¬a4„ve just attracted $30 million in venture funding for Cheezburger Network, the company that owns them.
Cheezburgera4‚¬a4„s flagship site was founded in 2007 as a place for users to post &''LOLcats&'' &8212' pictures of cats with funny text, like the image accompanying this post. Chief executive Ben Huh and his initial investors purchased the I Can Has Cheezburger site and founded the Cheezburger company in September of that year. The Seattle-based startup has been profitable since them, and it now attracts 16.5 million monthly visitors adding up to 375 million pageviews and 110 million video views.
Still, Huh said that without substantial funding, the company has had to think relatively small. The new money will allow Cheezburger to experiment and take more risks, he said. I asked if that means launching or buying more sites (after all, Huh offered to buy popular news aggregator Reddit last year) but he said hea4‚¬a4„s more interested in hiring engineers to improve the existing sites. For example, he said that ita4‚¬a4„s time to upgrade the LOLcat image building tool on I Can Has Cheezburger, because it hasna4‚¬a4„t been improved in more than a year.
The funding was led by Foundry Group. Avalon Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, and SoftBank Capital also invested. $30 million seems like a lot of money for a blog network, but Huh said the investors arena4‚¬a4„t pressuring him to hit a specific revenue target, rather they&'re encouraging him to continue building the best company he can. Here&'s how he explained his plan for building that company:
The first generation of the Web was about e-commerce and news, it was about information gathering. The second generation is more about expression, and ita4‚¬a4„s creation-driven. It was really the formation of Internet culture.
Now we see something bigger there that we want to be a part of. How do we get there I dona4‚¬a4„t really have the answer. Thata4‚¬a4„s why this money is important to us, to try to experiment, to try to understand the market.
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Companies: Avalon Ventures, Cheezburger, Foundry Group, Madrona Venture Group, Softbank Capital
People: Ben Huh
Companies: Avalon Ventures, Cheezburger, Foundry Group, Madrona Venture Group, Softbank Capital
People: Ben Huh
Anthony is a senior editor at VentureBeat, as well as its reporter on media, advertising, and social networks. Before joining the site in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. (All story pitches should also be sent to tips@venturebeat.com) You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.
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