The company behind the popular ICanHasCheezburger site has launched a new website, EngrishFunny, which makes fun of grammatically incorrect variations of English (often found in Asia). Users send in photos of poorly translated or written products, signs, instructions, etc. to the site.
This is the seventh website for parent company Pet Holdings, Inc., which bought the ICanHasCheezburger site in late 2007 for $2 million. Other sites include Ihasahotdog (dogs), Failblog (my personal favorite), Totallylookslike (celebrities), Punditkitchen (politics) and Graphjam.
I sat down with founder Ben Huh today to talk about the new site and how the company is doing in general. The family of sites is generating 3.3 million daily page views, and around 5 million unique monthly visitors. Total revenue per page is north of $0.80, he says. Watch the full interview below.
wow, $2,000,000. i’ve really been wasting my time with all this effort crap.
I have so many photos of funny misspellings too!
North of $0.80? Really… so Napkin Math (TM) says then that’s $1,000,000 per year (3.3M x .80 = 2640 * 365 = 963,600).
Which then raises the question of why he’d sell the original site for only twice the yearly profit when other sites are selling for/valued at unbelievable multiples.
Ah yes, “family of sites.” But check Google Trends and you’ll see the other ones barely register and are fed by the original.
Do these people assume TC readers failed elementary school math?
the site has grown significantly since they acquired it last year.
Google Trends shows that it has perhaps doubled since that time. So okay, 4X. Why would the original owners sell at a measly four times yearly profits, knowing they have a site that’s growing fast? Did they not have a counter installed? Bebo sold how times over its yearly profit?
http://trends.g...cheezburger.com
Yeah right! Those numbers don’t add up dude. Here’s what I think the problem is when a lot of these start-up guys get into running websites. They don’t have a clue about the rates at which niches monetize.
First of all, this kind of entertainment has about the lowest cpm rates of any type of content you can think of. You know how many work at home independent webmasters there are to compete with in this kind of content??? They are the stainless steel providers of time wasting content who do not have outside investment or employees.
Pet Holdings, Inc. unfortunately bought themselves into the wrong niche right up to the hilt. I’d say this shows a total lack of experience about monetizing content. They would have done well to lurk in webmaster forums before embarking on this start-up adventurism.
The guy seems nice enough, but this is a story that ends in tears. You can talk about memes all you want, but memes are pretty much free. They don’t earn money.
If you are an independent webmaster working from home, you can make some nice coin with a network like this. Many already do with bigger traffic than Pet Holding has. If you are taking on investors and employees you are setting yourself up for a not so comfortable place on the fail blog. I Can Haz Cheezburger is their only unique offering, and I find it pretty weak in the whole viral humor niche. All the other sites they have are also-rans with nothing unique about them. This is being done much better by other independent sites.
Massive Effing Fail
Are you not confusing profit with revenue?
He has 12 employees. Already 1M revenue a year divided by 12 makes a pretty miserable salary, and they must have some fixed cost, etc.
No, because I’m talking about the original two guys. I hardly doubt uploading a few images a day constitutes huge expenses. Hosting costs aren’t that much either. So there’s very little expenses to be subtracted (for the original guys).
Although it makes me wonder why they need 12 people in the first place.
Sometimes going for entertainment value and not making people think pays well. I am curious about long term viability.
One thing’s for sure: when they release a new Facebook application, I’ll hear about it from you first!
Blogs posting funny photos are plenty alright! Checkout my own mostly focused on Australian signs and posters plus some international; only original photos and you can submit your own if you wish. Most importantly, there is no advertising on the site; it is just for fun! Check it out at
http://funnyaussiesigns.com
PS: Anyone wants to buy it for $2 million?
How many PVs does it get a day?
My guess, not enough.
what does revenue per page mean?
That’s $0.80 CPM, not “per page”, according to the interview. So $0.0008 per page.
That’s how I counted.
if you listen later in the interview, we start talking about RPM.
RPM still includes the M letter, doesn’t it? So it means per thousand, I believe.
Hey i have few for you..
An Employee wanted a day off to attend her mother in law’s funeral. He wrote to her employer
“As my mother-in-law has expired and I am only one responsible for it , please grant me 10 days leave.”
A leave letter to the headmaster:
“As I am studying in this school I am suffering from headache. I request you to leave me today”
“Dear Sir: with reference to the above , please refer to my below…”
“My wife is suffering from sickness and as I am her only husband at home I may be granted leave”.
A candidate’s job application:
“This has reference to your advertisement calling for a ‘ Typist and an Accountant – Male or Female’… As I am both(!! )for the past several years and I can handle both with good experience , I am applying for the post.
Good isn’t it?
While it’s always humorous to make fun of others command of the English language, this is not exactly a new idea, http://www.engrish.com has been around for years, and continues to make me chuckle every day…
Exactly. This is nothing more and nothing else than a “me too” site. Awful. No talent.
I was just about to say… engrish.com was there for years. and successful, too, I believe.
Me three… been enjoying that site for years. I mean, this seems like a good thing for the LOLcats army to tackle, and I’m sure the new site will be good, but the name is a little close for comfort.
The last 60 seconds of the interview are really fun.
Michael: how about a “last 60 sec” TechCrunch property?
dunno about this. i’d like to see the chinese equivalent pointing out chinese goofs by non-native speakers.
pretty sure that was a camera power-off FAIL.
tell ben he should buy up one of the chinese sites that show pictures of foreigners with chinese language tattoos they obviously didn’t get the translation for…
What a joke … this is just a complete copy of http://www.engrish.com/
Terrible, terrible, terrible
I guess 4chan i feeding much more websites every day… http://moronail.net/
Their feed url return 404.
Is there any typo about address?
Mike, your lack of sophistication is showing.
First, as pointed out but not corrected in your post, 80 cents per page is not the same as .8 cpm. No one in publishing talks about dollars per page. The M is critical. He’s selling ads for 80 cents per thousand. About $3,000 per day.
BUT, you missed the essence of the business model: he runs more than one ad per page! So, you have no idea what his revenue actually is, but it’s probably a gross cpm of $3 once you count all the ads he’s running. Or $12,000 a day…
Sometimes, the math matters.
this concept was a feature in the far eastern economic review for years, back in less enlightened times.
how cool is it to mock people’s english, especially if it is their second or third or fourth language?
not so cool in my opinion. hope the site dies. but i know it won’t.
omg ,… fail blog is hilarious.
I AM IN UR MEME, PUMPING IT FULL OF INVESTOR CAPITAL 4 THE PURPOSES OF ADSENSE ADS
THEY DIDN’T TAKE VC!
@Doug: As others noted, he likely meant revenue per thousand pages (RPM), which already takes into account the number of ads per page. Advertisers don’t talk about RPM b/c they typically buy units on a CPM or CPC basis… However, most publishers care most about RPM.
100 Million page views per month and 18 pages per visitor seems very high.
Seems like a ripoff of engrish.com to me.
Seems to be just a rip off of Engrish.com
The Cheezburger Gang is awesome!! A true study on viral growth, impressive content and staying relevant, they are like digg was 3 years ago.
Sadly, I dont think most TC readers understand the subtle brilliance of the cheezburger.
KTHXBAI (LOL speak for the less gifted frequenters of this site)
i never knew ben was asian
but that site shows that you dont have to blog about tech or celebs to make money
@ uvox
There’s also this site: http://www.hanzismatter.com/
I agree with those asking for some clarification on the cash flow (and no, I’m afraid that I can’t be bothered to watch the video – that’s not why I come here)
If it really is revenue per page of $0.80 that puts daily revenue somewhere not that far south of $3 million a day. Michael can haz calclater plz?
Were you, as others suggest, actually talking about revenue per thousand pages?
Straight jacked http://www.engrish.com and lost all the talent went with the 2 million dollars.
ITS CALLED ENGRISH.COM STOP CAPITALIZING ON OTHER PEOPLES IDEAS AND HARD WORK AND CREATE SOMETHING NEW.
Hardly an original site; http://www.engrish.com has been around far longer with better content!
I have to agree – this is blatant rip off of Engrish.com. Couldn’t they just change the name? I hope that the original site wins the battle.
I wish that Anonymous would continue DDoS’ing the hell out of these thieves, bastardizing free memes that were fine and hilarious all on their own, for the sake of money.
Everything the ICanHasCheezburger group has done is contrived and highly unoriginal, and definitely not as funny or humorous as the original.
I’ll go so far as to say that they’re as horrible as EbaumsWorld as far as stealing content and branding it with their company logo.
Free memes were and always will be superior because they survive, thrive, die off, and leave the rest to evolve into something new, just like creatures in nature. If anyone ever actually studied memes (Richard Dawkins) then they would realize that this is the TRUE mechanism behind them, not a stupid image app that puts Impact text with crappy grammar over a cat picture “so everyone can be hilarious!11″
Sorry kids, not everyone can be funny and original.
Why is everyone bashing these guys? They took a smart business idea and ran with it. they provide funny and relevant content to millions of users a day, is it a crime to make money off it?
Money makes the world go round folks. There’s nothing “free” in this world.
The LOL cat meme continues to scale the social ladder.
Check out, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman’s LOL cat-inspired post at the NYTimes.
http://krugman....-next-few-days/
Credit to http://attentio....wordpress.com/ for its blog title “I can has Nobel Prize?”
great topic
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