Lol-ing All the Way to the Bank

The Big Money takes an inside look at Pet Holdings Inc., a Seattle-based startup that serves as the umbrella to online phenoms such as Fail Blog, I Can Has Cheezburger and Engrish Funny.  Although the company didn’t invent these online fads turned institutions, they have monetized them by building a business model based on the marketing of internet memes, either buying up preexisting real estate on the web or developing brand new sites around them. Currently, their budding empire gets nearly 5.5 million page views per day, making it one the most popular networks of sites on the entire web.

At a time when people are already bombarded by information at every turn and where authenticity can quickly transform into selling out, the internet further shifts our culture of saturation and transience into overdrive, making the business of identifying what ideas will have lasting appeal temperamental at best. Yet thus far, Pet Holdings has shown a pretty impressive track record. CEO Ben Huh explains:

Pet Holdings is constantly on the lookout for new memes, and it’s constantly finding reasons for why things won’t work. Huh declined to name specific ideas he’s rejected, but he offered a hypothetical example: “Say there was a giraffe-necking site—beautiful pictures of these peaceful creatures, intertwining their necks, in love. And this site has lots of these photos. Fantastic, right? Maybe it becomes a meme, maybe people love these photos and it becomes viral—we’ll still pass on that.” Why? “Because there’s only so many ways a giraffe can neck,” he says.

Still, even if you’re able to correctly identify and grab hold of one of these sensations the moment before they blowup on the web, the real key to Pet Holdings’ success might have more to do with their clandestine sphere of influence than anything else. Through their loosely affiliated sites, the company has created a portal that can rapidly spread these ideas throughout their communities and when necessary, has the infrastructure in place to design a website to house them.

An ingenious, albeit slightly insidious means of funneling user traffic and monopolizing a “viral” concept which seems to go against the prevailing theory that these online events need to grow organically. But to that end, Pet Holdings is in the process of seeding the internet with a dozen new memes in an experiment to find out which ones will take on a life of their own, separate from their other sites. The best candidates from this group will then be further “developed” throughout the network. And while figuring out what will explode into the next big thing might be impossible to determine, at least one thing is for certain – whatever it is will be flooding our inboxes and popping up on our Facebook pages before we know it. We’ll make sure to send you the link.  

The Big Money: I Can Has Internet Millions