Happy President’s Day.
Nonsense curated by Shane Adams, a fiction writer from Philadelphia. Read more...
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WIRED wrote a great article on Ben Huh and the success of the Cheezburger franchise:
What most people view as a workday time-suck, Huh sees as a potential gold mine. And so far, he’s been right. Back in September 2007, when most tech players were pouring VC money into the next Facebook, Huh hooked up with a group of angel investors to buy his first fledgling phenomenon, the I Can Has Cheezburger? blog. Since then, he has built Cheezburger Network into the largest aggregator of Web memes, pulling in more than 200 million pageviews a month combined. Huh won’t divulge financial specifics, but investor documents show the Cheezburger Network approached $4 million in revenue last year. The money comes from display ads (companies like American Express and Burger King sponsor the sites) as well as books (the lolcat series has produced two New York Times best-sellers), T-shirts, and other merch. “In the past year and a half, a meme industry has come into place,” says Tim Hwang, organizer of ROFLcon, a biannual Web-celebrity gathering. “There are people who are interested in commercializing memes. Ben’s accelerating that development.”
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Why Some Memes Never Die
Scott Brown:
The other day, I found an artifact in my dresser drawer under a pair of mercifully underutilized jodhpurs and the glow-in-the-dark “survival briefs” my grandmother gave me for Y2K. The object was mashed, flattened, and bristling with cotton dingleberries, but it was, unmistakably, a Strong Bad knit cap. There he was, vividly stitched, a balloony ‘toon in a candy-apple-red Mexican wrestler mask: the de facto star of Homestar Runner. Remember Homestar, that Flash-animated Web series from those halcyon pre-YouTube days when Web series were the Future, videos stayed put on their sites of origin, and we all had to walk a mile in the snow to find a data jack? I hadn’t visited since 2005 — a billion lifetimes ago in meme years — and, frankly, I assumed Homestar had run its last lap. Imagine my surprise, then, to find the site alive and well and celebrating its 10th (!) anniversary. Ten years! Heck, Cheers only lasted 11. ‘Twas then I realized, with equal parts horror and delight: The Web and I are both old enough to have our own Cheers.
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Elspeth Jane investigates the viral onomatopoeia phenomenon known as “nomming” for Know Your Meme. (via Rocketboom)
