Ben Huh

Ben Huh has built a pretty nice business around wasting other people's time.

Huh's network of odd-ball humor Web sites -- a cat picture blog called I Can Has Cheezburger, a site devoted to mishaps called Fail Blog and six others -- attract more than 4million page views per day. You read that right. Four million -- a day.

Those numbers, not to mention the company's profits, put Huh's startup in a select group of Internet companies that are actually making money from online advertising.

I chatted with the journalist-turned-Internet-entrepreneur at the company's no thrills headquarters in Seattle's lower Queen Anne neighborhood. [Related Content: Video: Ben Huh Shows Off the LOL Cats HQ.]

The Chief Cheezburger -- yes, that's his official title -- admits that he runs one of the more unusual Seattle area startup companies. After all, not many startups make their money relying on fans to submit photos of cats and dogs with captions in an unusual language known as LOL speak.

In our interview, Huh discussed everything from competing against YouTube to his first job sweeping floors at the IRS. 

On the company mission: "We don't have lofty goals of categorizing all of the world's information. We are not saving seals. We just want to get you away from whatever is consuming you for five minutes, and that's it....The company goal is to make people happy for five minutes a day." 

On buying I Can Has Cheezburger last year: "There were two things. One was the incredible traffic. It was doing 500,000 page views a day for a cat picture site, that nobody understood, which I thought was fantastic... And second, it was the incredible community. It had amazing buzz. We felt like that there was a pretty good possibility that we were buying into a cultural phenomenon, a shift in the way people perceived entertainment."

On investor perceptions: "We stuck to the numbers and we stuck to the compelling story about culture... A lot of the investors said, 'I don't get it but the numbers are really compelling and the story is really compelling here, so let's take a risk on this one.'"

On coming up with ideas: "We actually don't do anything new. People have this misconception that I am sitting here twiddling my thumbs going: 'Ah, cats with misspelled captions' and we invent it. We don't do any of that. What we do is look at Internet culture and look at what is happening online and say: 'how do we make this simpler and how do we make this available to a wider audience." 

On his journalism degree: "I am sure that my journalism professors are roiling in their class rooms, knowing that I am destroying English."

On language: "I see us as a mirror into Internet society. This thing really came from the depths of the Internet --   4Chan, SomethingAwful, Fark --  where people kind of play with media and content and culture and this is a great reflection of that. And the outcome is they invented this pseudo-texting, pseudo-l33t, pseudo-whatever language."

On the sites' tone: "You won't see a lot of negative words in LOL (laughing out loud) speak. People tend to stick to positiveness.... It is a lot of very happy connotation, which I think is the personality of the site. There is an entire wiki full of words that they use, and it is fascinating to watch the vocabulary grow and grammatical rules established. They call it a pidgin, which is like a class of linguistical change." (CORRECTION: Thanks to the reader who pointed out the misspelling of pidgin. It has been changed.)

On competitors: "If I had to come up with competition, I would have to say it is YouTube. It is a time waster. It is a way for you to kill 5 or 10 minutes of your boredom. And that is probably the closest competition we've got and it is killing us. And it is killing me. I just can't beat YouTube. It is hard." (Laughs)

On next steps: "We've got two new sites in development, they are both in early-stage and they are both video related. And then there is an acquisition we are working on."

On whether he submits content to the sites: "I do, and it gets voted down like you wouldn't believe. They think I suck."

On the typical contributor:  "We basically have two groups of sites, young male-oriented and young female-oriented. So I can Has Cheezburger and I Has a Hotdog tend to be female skewing and Fail Blog, Engrish Funny and  Pundit Kitchen tend to be male skewed."

On the sites' technology: "I've worked at startups before and this is just like no other problems we have ever seen. It is like scale, scale, scale. Make things work at a very high scale.... We account for 10 percent of WordPress.com's page views.... When we were at less than 500,000 page views we moved to WordPress and we were serving so much traffic for images, that they had to re-architect the way they served images. They actually use our site as a testing platform."

On running the startup: "We think of this more as a small business than we do a startup. We grow like a startup, but it is run like a small business....We need to make sure when we do a feature that it is eventually going to pay off to a point where it justifies the cost of doing it, because we got to run this thing profitable. We don't have six million in the bank."

On raising more money: "It depends on where we want to go. If we wanted to be the world's largest humor network, sure. If we wanted to continue to organically grow ... maybe not. I think we are doing OK... If we wanted to, we could be the largest user generated humor network out there, which is a pretty lucrative market. I don't know. We will see."

On someone offering $50,000 for the company a few months ago: "Someone didn't do their homework. We did not take that offer." (Laughs)

On his sense of humor: "I think one of the reasons why I have this job is that I don't have a cutting-edge sense of humor. I don't have this kind of weird-out-there type of humor. I am pretty normal, I guess, so I can actually relate to the masses. I don't like the really weird stuff. I am not, like, hip."

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Ben Huh Quick Facts:

Born: Seoul, South Korea. Moved to Sacramento, California at 14.

Age: 30

Education: Journalism degree from Northwestern University.

Favorite beverage: Jones Cola.

Favorite TV shows: Lost, Ugly Betty, Grey's Anatomy.

Favorite comedian: Tina Fey

Mode of transportation: Walking

Allergies: Cats.

First job: Cleaning the warehouse floor of the IRS document repository in Sacramento,Calif.

What job would you have if you weren't in your current role: "My wife and I were thinking before this that we would open a waffle shop, a fast food, mall-style waffle shop."