I Can Has Cheezburger?

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I Can Has Cheezburger?
Ichc logo.png
Web address icanhas.cheezburger.com
Type of site
Blog
Owner Cheezburger, Inc.
Created by Co-founder Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebesami
Launched January 2007
Revenue Advertisements
Alexa rank
Increase 1,404 (January 2015)[1]
Current status active
Cheezburger, Inc. former CEO Ben Huh at ROFLCon II in 2010
An example of an image that was posted on ICHC

I Can Has Cheezburger? (ICHC for short) is the name of a weblog-format website featuring videos (usually involving animals) and image macros. It was created in 2007 by Eric Nakagawa (Cheezburger), a blogger from Hawaii, and his friend Kari Unebasami (Tofuburger).[citation needed] The website is one of the most popular internet sites of its kind. It received as many as 1,500,000 hits per day at its peak in May 2007.[2][3] ICHC was instrumental in bringing animal-based image macros and lolspeak into mainstream usage and making internet memes profitable.[4]

ICHC was created on January 11, 2007, when Nakagawa posted an image from Something Awful of a smiling British Shorthair, known as Happycat, with a caption of the cat asking, "I can has cheezburger?" in a style popularized by 4chan (reference needed). It is from this image that the site derives its name. After posting similar images, Nakagawa then converted the site to a monetized blog.[3]

A group of investors acquired the website in September 2007 for US $2 million.[5] The blog became the flagship site of the Cheezburger Network, led by former CEO Ben Huh. The network also includes FAIL Blog and Know Your Meme.

Content

ICHC's content is submitted by the site's readers, and hosts "the LOL Builder," an image macro creation tool. The number of submissions has risen dramatically with the growth of the site. In July 2007, ICHC received as many as 500 submissions per day.[6] By January 2008, the average was 8000.[4] Only about a dozen or so submissions per day are posted to the website,[7] while updates are timed to coincide with when readers are most likely to be visiting the site – morning, lunch time and evenings.[3] As of early 2008, ICHC gets about 2 million page views per day.[8]

The site attempts to maintain a community feel, encouraging interactivity with readers via a voting system where users can rate an image from one to five "cheezburgers", and through themes as one image will attract responses to form a continuous narrative. According to Nakagawa, "It's like you're creating a story supplied by people in the community, and then the people in the community supply the next part of the story."[3] ICHC also hosts a wiki known as "The Lolspeak Wiki" designed to be a collection of important lolspeak phrases.

Popular trends on the ICHC website for captioning have included "ceiling cat" (usually a white cat); "basement cat" (a black cat); the "itteh bitteh kitteh committeh"; invisible [something]; "I'm in your (noun), (verb ending in ing) your (noun)"; the Lolrus and his "bukkit"; fail (now moved to FAIL Blog); "om nom nom" (as in eating sounds); references to "cheezburgers"; "happy caturday"; " [some activity or emotion], ur doin it right/wrong"; "monorail kitteh"; "oh hai"; "I gave/brought you [something] but I eated it/uzed it all up"; and "kthxbai" ("OK, thanks, goodbye").

Fonts

The typeface Impact is used in almost every picture on all the I Can Has Cheezburger websites (though not as much on its subsidiary websites, such as Memebase), and has even gone as far as to be attempted to be replicated in an oil painting representation of the original "Happy cat" (the original lolcat to say "I Can Has Cheezburger?") on the ICHC website. This use of the font stems from it being the font of choice in Something Awful image macros for many[9] hence it is the default font in the site's Lolcat Builder. Many people creating lolcats in other software have used the same font to retain the classic I Can Has Cheezburger look. Other standard fonts are available for use as well on the builder.

Spin-off projects and publications

A network of related sister sites has developed alongside ICHC, called the Cheezburger Network. 25 of these are linked to each other via a navigation bar at the top of each site. LOLwork on Bravo chronicles employees lives at the ICHC office.[10]

ICHC produced a book, I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Colleckshun, in 2008.[11] A second ICHC book, How To Take Over The Wurld: A LOLcat Guide 2 Winning, was published in 2009.[12] Also, FAIL Blog released its first book, Fail Nation: A Visual Romp Through the World of Epic Fails, on October 6, 2009.[13]

Cheezburger is the subject of the LOLwork reality television series on the Bravo television network. The series follows Ben Huh and his staff as they create new content for the site.[14]

ICanHazPDF, derived from I Can Has Cheezburger, is a hashtag used on Twitter by researchers seeking academic papers for free to get around academic journals' paywalls.[15]

See also

References

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  9. Whatport80.com, History and design of image macros Archived March 28, 2010 at the Wayback Machine
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External links