Greetings from Austin, Texas! There’s a huge movie, music and interactive festival taking place here this week, and as I’m a big geek, I’m here for the SXSW Interactive Festival, a tech convention which is a combination of bloggers, Web 2.0 folks, CEOs and artists. Among the hundreds of panelists this year, I had the opportunity to hang out (and sing drunken karaoke with) two of the remarkably down-to-earth guys behind the LOLcat phenomenon, Eric Nakagawa and Ben Huh of icanhascheezburger.com.
Never heard of LOLcats? Oh, yes you have, especially if you spend any time on a blog, bulletin board or gotten any e-mail forwards from a kitten loving aunt. (It also explains this somewhat bizarre image.) Eric created the website as an inside joke with his girlfriend at the time; when the website started receiving exponential growth, he quit is day job as a computer programmer to work on the site full-time. Now he’s in Seattle running a website that has 2.5 million monthly users. There have been discussions about LOLcat vernacular. A book deal is in the works.
Damn, they’re doing something they love, they’re getting paid, and they’re genuinely nice guys to boot. I’m pretty jealous.
(Flickr photo credit: Min Jung Kim)
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5 Comments to “LOLcat Guys Can Has Media Empire”
John wrote:
1.5 million page views a day? That is crazy! At least we have a goal for our future media empire
Looks like MJ is kissing people again…
John
Posted on 12-Mar-08 at 1:54 pm | Permalink
jozjozjoz wrote:
I want to meet these guys!
Posted on 13-Mar-08 at 11:42 am | Permalink
8Asians.com » LOLcats: a New Yorker Caption Contest for the Masses wrote:
[...] LOLcats has been written up on 8asians and referenced in countless articles. The book based on the website has been on the New York Times bestseller list. But a quick poll of my own friends revealed none who had heard of it. As popular as it currently is, LOLcats has room to grow and continue. [...]
Posted on 10-Jun-09 at 11:35 am | Permalink
8Asians.com » LOLcats: a New Yorker Caption Contest for the Masses wrote:
[...] LOLcats has been written up on 8asians and referenced in countless articles. The book based on the website has been on the New York Times bestseller list. But a quick poll of my own friends revealed none who had heard of it. As popular as it currently is, LOLcats has room to grow and continue. [...]
Posted on 10-Jun-09 at 11:35 am | Permalink
8Asians.com » Giveaway: Books From LOLCats, GraphJam and FailBlog wrote:
[...] of times — since their humble beginning as a way for an Asian American couple in Hawaii to send funny photographs of cats and walruses with captions about cheezburgers and buckits, it has since become a media empire, spawning a book deal and a couple of other additional humor [...]
Posted on 14-Oct-09 at 6:01 am | Permalink
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