Behind the silly websites, a proper company

They may rank as among the goofiest websites on the Internet. ‘I Can Has Cheezburger’, for instance, is nothing more than a collection of captioned cat photos. ‘Failblog’ is filled with photos and videos of things gone terrible wrong, and people doing stupid things. But the sites are phenomenally popular and have defied the boom and bust cycle of many Internet trends. Perhaps more amazingly, for the company that owns the sites, Pet Holdings Inc., they actually make money. The Pet Holdings collection of silly sites draws 5.5 million pageviews a day. And the company has a staff of 10 full-time staff developing and designing the sites. Jokes the company’s founder, and former journalist, Ben Huh, people “don’t understand the scale of this. It’s a proper sweatshop.”

Slate