Ben Huh, Founder of Failblog.org & icanhascheezburger.com

Fri, 05/19/2006 - 1:24pm

When: February 5, 2010 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

Ben Huh - the Internet mogul behind the hit blogs - I Can Haz Cheezburger (also known as the LOL Cats blog) and FAILBlog will discuss his life as an Internet content connoisseur, what that means, and how he got started as the leader of a media empire. Huh founded his company, Pet Holdings, Inc., in 2007 and grew it into one of the largest blog networks in the world in less than two years -- while making a profit during one of the deepest recessions.He has been credited with bringing Internet memes to the mainstream and popularizing Internet culture. Huh is not shy about crediting the success of his company to the users and fans of his sites. His goal is to make the world happy for 5-minutes a day.

Transcript

• [00:00:00.00] [MUSIC PLAYING]
• [00:00:21.86] ERIN HELMRICH: My name is Erin Helmrich, and I'm one of the teen services librarians here. I am extremely excited we brought Ben all the way from Seattle, so he can regale you with their cold weather too. So how many people are regular daily fans of I Can Has Cheezburger and FAIL Blog? All right. How many of you are wondering what the hell those are, and that's why you're here today? OK. How many of you want to know how you too can make money doing things like that? OK. Ben has several tracks of conversation that he can continue. He is indeed the CEO of the Cheezburger Network, but I think you will also appreciate knowing that he is allergic to cats.
• [00:01:03.87] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:01:05.97] We are going to take lots of questions. Ben would prefer to save them for the end, so unless there's some really burning thing you need to know, we'll do plenty of time for Q&A at the end. So without further ado, please welcome Ben Huh.
• [00:01:17.80] [APPLAUSE]
• [00:01:18.91] BEN HUH: Thank you so much for being here. Can everybody hear me OK? Is the microphone on? Fine? OK.
• [00:01:22.91] I'd like to thank Erin and Ann Arbor District Library for bringing me all the way out here. Usually when we're stuck in Seattle in winters like this, it's nice to go out and understand everybody else has a miserable winter too.
• [00:01:33.17] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:01:34.60] So like Erin explained, I am the CEO and co-founder of the Cheezburger Network. To be very clear, I actually didn't start the website I Can Has Cheezburger? It was started by two people in Hawaii, and they didn't come up with the idea of putting captions on cat pictures either. It started out before in a forum called 4chan, and a bunch of other internet humor forums.
• [00:01:55.74] I'm going to read you through the history of the site. And I was going to talk a little bit about internet culture -- what it is and how it's impacting our life, especially for the younger folks in the crowd. And how meaningful an impact it'll probably have over the next 25 to 50 years, just as television changed our world when it came on to the masses in the 1950s.
• [00:02:16.24] The name "I Can Has Cheezburger?" comes from this specific photo. It literally says, "I can has cheezburger?" The two people in Hawaii -- they were dating at the time -- and the girlfriend actually found the photo and IM'ed it over to her boyfriend, and said -- "Don't you think this is funny?" And he just laughed. He laughed for so long he decided, "I'm going to build a website, and I'm going to call it 'I Can Has Cheezburger?'" Notice the z. It's not spelled like "cheeseburger," it's got its own spelling. It's called lolspeak, and I'll get into that. So this was the very first photo that he posted on the site.
• [00:02:52.52] But let me take you a little bit before in time. I think some of the older folks in the audience may recognize this poster. This was a poster from, I believe, the 1970s -- which is a kitten with a caption on the photo. This qualifies as a lolcat, which is a genre of cat photos with captions on it. So this is the funky father to lolcats from the 1970s. Well, you know what -- we're actually going to go a little bit before that. OK. Well.
• [00:03:19.37] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:03:20.76] If you can't read what's on there, it says "WHAT'S DELAYING MY DINNER?", in all caps. This was a postcard found by a fan who lives in Seattle. She was going through the antique stores in Seattle and came across this photo, and said -- "Oh my goodness, this is a lolcat". From 1905. We had to bring it into the office, we scanned it, and we declared that this is the oldest lolcat that we know of. But is also entirely possible --
• [00:03:48.94] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:03:52.30] -- that in the beginning of civilization, somebody may have carved a hieroglyphic text in front of the sphinx. And if you can recognize the tail and the arms of the sphinx, that's a cat. Therefore -- I'm still trying to find out if there was hieroglyphics in front of the sphinx -- that would qualify as the oldest lolcat that we know of.
• [00:04:14.05] So, what's the difference
• [00:04:17.07] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:04:17.97] between "Hang in there cat", and today? What's changed? Why does a guy standing in front you today have a job posting cat photos on the internet?
• [00:04:29.47] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:04:31.30] In fact, it's not just me. There's 32 of us being employed full-time by a company in Seattle that posts funny cat photos on the internet. We've grown to more than 40 sites now, and we basically have a little humor empire that we're building. But in the beginning the internet changed everything. The internet said -- you can no longer just rely on television to get your laughs every day. You can actually create a small community of people who love something enough that they're willing to invest a tiny bit of their time every day to create their own content, and share it with each other. It's a meritocratic way of sharing their sense of humor. And what it did was, it made it so much more accessible for people. And free software such as WordPress -- which is the software that we use for our blog platform -- made it virtually cost-free to run this. The very first I Can Has Cheezburger? hosting cost Eric, one of the co-founders, $6.99 a month. This entire empire started from one photo somebody created, and $6.99 in hosting. It's absolutely incredible.
• [00:05:37.63] SPEAKER 1: That's no big deal.
• [00:05:38.54] BEN HUH: Yeah, we do that every day almost -- every week we launch a new website, actually. So, on January 11, 2007 he posted this photo. And by March -- and honestly, we don't know why and how people found this website, because there was zero marketing involved. People kept on sending it to other people. And the site grew and grew and grew, and eventually the $6.99 host called us and said -- "You gotta get off. It's costing us more than $6.99 to host you. You gotta move somewhere else."
• [00:06:11.00] So September of 2007 rolls around. I purchased the website with a bunch of investors money to run a business from it. Well, I'm going to rewind a little bit there, too. In April of 2007, that's when I first heard about this website. Somebody sent me a link, a friend of mine, and said -- "You really need to take a look at this, it's really funny." So I clicked on icanhascheezburger.com, I went there, and I said -- "I don't understand. I am not sure why you sent me this, because I don't think this is all that funny." A couple weeks later somebody else sends me a link -- "You have to go to this website." "I've been there before." "Try it again." I go there -- "I kind of don't get it. I don't know. It's a bunch of cats. What do I care? I don't even have a cat, I have a dog." And then the third time somebody sent it to me, I said fine, I'm going to spend a little bit more time and try to understand this. So this is again in April. I go there -- and I don't remember which photo it was -- but there was one photo with a caption that I saw that I thought was really funny. And a lightbulb went off, and I said -- "Oh, I get it! They're like people, but in cats.
• [00:07:12.18] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:07:14.02] I don't know what's up with the spelling, but boy this is actually pretty funny." I spent some time, and I told my wife -- "Honey, you should look at this. This is really funny." And she came over and she said -- "I don't get it."
• [00:07:22.05] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:07:23.47] Lo and behold, a few months later we'd be running it full-time.
• [00:07:28.76] After we bought it, we decided -- "You know, this isn't a pet thing." When the investors put up money, they said -- "What are you going to do, lolaardvarks? Lolgiraffes?" I said -- "Maybe." But the important part about this community was that it loved humor. Just as much as it loved pets and animals, it also loved the fact that for five minutes a day, they could get away from what was troubling them and enjoy this virtual world. So we wanted to do something that was different, and we saw a bunch of these graphs out there. That wasn't business-related, there were people who were taking musical lyrics and putting it to graph form. So we said -- you know, we could actually build a site that did that. So we actually launched a new website, had a bunch of staffers actually create their own -- which weren't very good, to be honest -- post it in an Excel spreadsheet they could download, so they could actually punch in the numbers themselves, and actually write what they wanted. It was really crude, really rudimentary. And then we put it out there, and we told people at I Can Has Cheezburger? -- "Hey, come check this out. It's not kittens its graphs." And they said -- "Ah, it's not that cute." It didn't really work, but what was funny was -- even though in the grand scheme of things it didn't really work, there were enough people who liked it enough that they continued to create new content. And we didn't make it easy. If you go to I Can Has Cheezburger?, you can take any photo and put a caption on it in like five seconds. And with this, you have to download the spreadsheet, you have to change the values, you have to take a screen shot and email it back to us. It was really hard to do, but the community thrived. It continued to create new content. And in fact, they moved away from music -- as you can see -- and then they moved to actually more everyday life. And it became incredibly successful when we let the insane people run the asylum, so to speak. That was our position -- "Look, we don't really know what's going to happen to this website. You guys are the ones creating content, so if you guys want to see this stuff, we'll put it up." And that's what they did. They took over and they said -- "You know what, we're going to take control of this thing." In fact, we published a book based on GraphJam, called Graph Out Loud, which is musical lyrics in graph form.
• [00:09:36.10] And then we launched another website --
• [00:09:37.92] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:09:43.59] Totally Looks Like. A lot of celebrity websites were comparing celebrities to other celebrities. And then we said -- "Hey, why don't we turn the keys of the insane asylum to the people who are in it." So we said, "Hey, we will give you a builder " -- so you could actually go to the builder, upload two photos, rotate it, zoom it, and make a comparison. This is done by a user. Notice the very good alignment of the eyes. They care about this stuff deeply. So when we gave the tools for the users to create new content, they did exactly that -- and boom, there was a community of people.
• [00:10:20.21] And we can't obviously leave out the dogs. That language you see there -- the dog community tends to be more about cute than they are about funny. As a dog owner, I find this pretty funny. It's called lolspeak -- lol speak. So what's with the spelling of all this stuff? Lolspeak is comprised of a bunch of different slang, language pigeon, creole on the internet. One's called leetspeak -- that's actually l33t, it stands for elite. It's basically a hacker lingo, where you exchange numbers and letters to form the actual English words. There's texting, of course I'm sure everyone here is very familiar with that phenomenon. And then there's common misspellings, such as teh -- teh. And just spelling a slang on the internet. And also, Shakespeare. The reason I bring up Shakespeare is that people usually write -- people who are offended by the fact that their cats can't spell, which happens all the time, email us and say -- "Why do you insist that cats don't know how to spell?" And my response to them is -- "It's actually not that, it's that cats don't want to talk like us, because they're better than us."
• [00:11:40.27] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:11:41.26] It's a good PR response I've come up with over time. But the reason I bring up Shakespeare is that language, English, evolves. Shakespearean English read today sounds completely different, and I'm sure that if you read our English to Shakespeare he would consider this an abomination. "Why do you guys use English in such a different way?" Or -- "Why do you hath thou English?" I don't know. So we're accepting the fact that technology and the way we interact with content and everyday life, changes the way in which we formulate words, meaning, and definition. And this happens all the time. There is no singular English, it is how we use it.
• [00:12:23.15] And then, something like this happens. You take a word like "fail", which use to exist in one different usage -- failure, to fail, and such, failed -- and then you turn it into a cultural phenomenon. We purchased FAIL Blog from a guy in London in April of 2008. It had been around for about four or five months, it was a relatively small website. I went there, I thought it was pretty interesting. It was a low risk decision for us. We bought it in April, and then the financial crisis happened in September, where banks started failing. And then the lexicon literally just changed overnight. The landscape of the use of the word "fail" became more about this, than it was about the proper way to use the word "fail". So lightning strikes twice, that's really fortunate for us. And we actually started posting videos on it. It's the number one comedy channel on YouTube, and our videos have been shown more than a billion times. Which actually makes us one of the largest independent video distributors in the world -- off of one website, featuring fails. It's pretty incredible, the power of people. And we don't create any of our content. So all of this you see here -- I'm not sure what Obama, Harry Potter, and Sonic the Hedgehog with roses have to do with each other.
• [00:13:48.87] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:13:50.16] I like this one a lot. It's amazing how quick we can change the numbers on a window sign. Write it backwards -- that's amazing. People ask us, "How long do you think this will last? How long do you think FAIL Blog will go on for?" And I say, "Have you seen humanity lately?" There will be an inhaustible supply of failures. For us, it's a matter of maintaining a community that wants to curate this stuff.
• [00:14:24.28] So we started growing our family. I've shown you some graphs, some things like that. We even entered the political arena with Pundit Kitchen, which we launched just after the Democratic primaries. That was a lot of fun. And then once the election actually occurred, we looked at each and said, "Uh, oh. There's nothing to do." All the politics had gone out. And then what happened -- the community took over and said, "You know, it's not about politics anymore. We're going to turn attention to news." And then started submitting things that were totally unrelated to politics. I said, "OK. If that's what you guys want to do, we'll do it."
• [00:14:58.69] And which has led to more than 40 sites. Our latest hit is called Failbooking.com. So FAIL Blog actually originally posted these Facebook fails back in, I think, August of 2008 -- pretty early on. And we saw this popping up all over the place and said, "All right, it's our turn. We better do something about this." So we launched Failbooking. It shows you how one person's -- how do I say this -- innocence can lead to pranking by a lot of people in this version. If you notice, there's 106 messages that's been sent to this poor girl.
• [00:15:36.76] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:15:39.69] This is an example where people ask the question-- "How do you keep this going? You've got 40 websites, where do you go from here?" And the answer is, I don't really know. As long as people continue to tell us, and as long as we continue to spot patterns in the way people use the internet and have fun, we're going to try to create a site for that niche. You like dark humor? Great, we'll try to do something for that. Do you like irony as a type of humor? Great, we launched a website called Friends of Irony. These domain names we actually kind of come up with in the office when we have had too much to -- party.
• [00:16:16.81] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:16:19.26] So the question was asked, will there be an inexhaustible supply of this stuff? And my answer is, how much bigger is the sun than the Earth? Because the way we see the world, it's actually like this. The amount of content that's produced by media versus users, the users completely dwarf the amount of content that's produced by mainstream media. And actually if you think about it -- I think I might have put the slides out of order -- the three largest companies in the world, three most influential companies in the world, that are media companies are Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Between the three of them, they probably influence more of our everyday media than anything else outside of mainstream media. The commonality between those three is actually the fact that none of them produce their own content. Facebook -- who produces Facebook's content? The users. Who produces Twitter's content? The users. Who produces Google's content? The rest of the world. There's a fundamental shift in the way we perceive media today. This is why user-generated content has taken off in the last few years.
• [00:17:27.75] There's also a secondary factoid, which is that I started a company in 1999. Remember the dot-com boom? Well I was in the middle of it. We started a software company, and we wanted to get it out the door -- so we wanted to create a product. It cost us $250,000 to create our single product and put it out the door. It was enormously cost-prohibitive. Today the cost of launching a product is virtually zero. Technology has come such a long way that you don't need to spend $250,000 anymore. That's why we exist. We launch a new website every single week. And the better part of that equation is that because we can launch something every single week, if something flops we take it down. We don't have to worry about -- "Oh, we spent all this money creating this thing. Can we try to throw good money after bad?" There's none of that discussion, if it doesn't work we get rid of it. We repurpose the domain for something else down the road. This idea of trial and error is something that we encourage in the office. We actually say -- "We celebrate our failures, and we reward our successes." Because if you don't know how to fail properly, if you don't know how to try something, and if you're afraid of failing -- you'll never try it again.
• [00:18:39.30] I'm going to go back to what it is about this user-generated content that's really interesting for me. And I call it micro humor. That's actually the very first picture I picked to post on FAIL Blog. To me it has the essence of micro humor. The guy who sent it to me said, "This is my friend, she tried to catch a frisbee, and she fell on her face. I would like you to post this photo on FAIL Blog, please." And I said why is this funny? It's funny to him because it was his friend, but it was funny to me because I have a shared experience -- not that I ever fell on my face like that. I know how to play frisbee, I've seen this before, therefore it is funny to me, I posted it. It is an inside joke that was shared. It's situational -- meaning you have to have been there to really enjoy it. It had subcultrual references -- I used to play ultimate frisbee, so I understand what this is like. So I posted it. The interesting thing about that is, if that was mass media no one would have cared. If that was on TV, it's kind of like -- "Well, why are they showing me this? Who cares?" But because there were enough people who had similar experiences -- the demographic of the people visiting FAIL Blog knew what ultimate frisbee was. Everybody knows what face punt is, which is what I call the national flower of FAIL Nation.
• [00:19:53.16] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:19:54.63] That photo actually did really well, and it was shared by a lot of people. They said, "You know, I can relate to this." Without the internet, without the fragmentation of media, you can't have those people connect and share something like this and enjoy it. It would've never made the 6:00 news, but it was front page and shown to millions of people who enjoyed it. That's micro humor. Micro humor is something that we've grown up with. I'll tell you what it is, and what it is not. What it is, is the type of thing that we laugh at when we're babies. When your mom or dad picked you up us a baby, and tickled you and made that funny face. That's not funny to me, but it was funny to you as a baby. It's a shared experience, this kind of inside joke. It's actually most of where we get our laughter from. When you have an office worker who cracks a funny joke about another coworker -- that's this micro humor, which has been completely ignored by mass media for the last 50 years. In fact, if you look at the days before mass media, this micro humor -- this inside joke -- was the dominant form of entertainment. That's why courts had jesters. The jesters in 18th century courts did not perform the Eddie Izzard routine he saw from television. That's not what he did. What the jester did was, they made fun of things that the royalty knew about. They leveraged the inside joke. And what we've done is come full circle. Because we can use the power of the internet to connect all these people who share different types of humor, we can now share this inside humor with a lot of people today.
• [00:21:22.18] In fact, all these things you see here is a spawn of this thing called micro humor, that the internet has enabled millions of people to share. Chuck Norris -- the greatest man ever alive. Evolution of the dance -- this is this guy, dancing on stage showing you the different types of dance over history. That's all it is. Just one video. Most watched video on all of YouTube's history. Where the Hell is Matt? -- it's a guy who goes traveling around the world and dances with people. It's pretty actually really inspirational. But without internet, no one would ever have seen it.
• [00:21:59.59] And of course, not to be left out, Rick Astley. So these internet memes have an interesting commonality -- trust me, I will not be playing the song, so you will not be Rickrolled. You're welcome. For those of you who don't know what a Rickroll is, I'll explain it very simply. You will send somebody a link to something, and you'll click on it thinking it's a legitimate piece of content. All of a sudden you'll be faced with this man singing the song -- "I won't let you down," blah blah blah. And you'll wonder to yourself -- "Why am I looking at this?" That is the Rickroll. It's a prank -- it's a very juvenile, simple prank.
• [00:22:37.72] But this started out as something called Duckrolling in 4chan, which is that unfiltered community where lolcats started. So it's sort of a duck rolling -- so you would actually send a link,, and the link would actually link you to a picture of a wooden duck with wheels on it. And that was supposed to be funny.
• [00:22:53.33] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:22:55.57] And then at some point in 2007 early on, some genius said -- "You know, instead of Duckrolling, I'm going to send you to this Rick Astley video." And then it took off. So this is actually search traffic on Google for the term Rickrolling. So all of a sudden it took off and it became funny. What they did was they took the old bait and switch, and changed the context and the meaning of a bait and switch. The really weird part about all this is that, if you were to send somebody a link to Rick Astley and they clicked on it and they were Rickrolled, you actually received no benefit whatsoever -- no reaction of any kind. It's over the internet, you don't know what's happening to that person on the other side. It's not like you're staring in their face and go -- "Aha, I pranked you," at the office. That doesn't occur. What actually happens is, because of the internet that person will come back to you and say -- "You're such a bleep." And then you know, "Oh, I did the right thing."
• [00:23:41.96] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:23:43.11] So this two-way communication enabled this thing called the bait and switch to occur over long distances at any point of the day. And all of a sudden -- this day was just before April Fool's, and everybody decided that on April Fool's 2008 they're going to Rickroll the world. At the top of the list was YouTube. YouTube changed every single link on their homepage, to the Rick Astley video.
• [00:24:09.71] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:24:14.89] And therein lies the birth and death of a meme. Now that everybody knew what it was, people actually started building tools that would actually tell you if a link would lead to a Rick Astely video.
• [00:24:27.29] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:24:29.82] One good deed does not -- yeah, nevermind. So this type of humor that we share -- it's like if you've been Rickrolled prior to April Fool's 2008, you have this shared experience with other people. So before mass media, this micro humor -- this inside joke -- was the dominant force. I use the force, Darth Vader Anyway. And this is the misplaced slide -- Google, Twitter, Facebook -- they don't publish their own content. Thank you very much. All right. And that's basically where we were born -- this inside subculture of people who decided that putting misspelled captions on cats were going to be really, really funny. And they shared it with their friends. And what happened was a person started collecting it, then it became a community, and then they started to participate, build a language, evolve it. There's actually even a lolspeak dictionary, which now spawned an entire cottage industry of meme building.
• [00:25:25.42] And that's it. That's my Twitter handle. That's my website. If you have any questions, I'm more than happy to answer for you guys.
• [00:25:31.69] Yes, back there.
• [00:25:32.79] SPEAKER 2: How much money do you make from this?
• [00:25:33.91] BEN HUH: The question is, how much money do I make from this. Well, remarkably enough we've been profitable since the beginning of our company. We started in September 2007. If you guys can remember that far back, that was the beginning of the recession. And I was telling Erin this in the podcast that she did for the library, if somebody would have told me -- "Hey, by the way, you're going to leave a six figure job as an executive and run a cat picture website. And by the way, for the next couple of years this is going to be the worst recession we've ever seen in our lifetime." I would have said - "Ah, no thanks."
• [00:26:02.49] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:26:03.91] The fact of the matter was, I wasn't happy in my job. It was a good job -- I made a good living -- but I was really frustrated. I had a big giant fortune 10 corporate client that I was responsible for, and it just wasn't fun anymore. So I was looking for a new job anyway. When this came along I decided -- "You know, I know I didn't get my journalism degree to put cat photos on the internet, but it sure beats the heck out of not being happy." So I left. And now today we employ 32 people. We're still profitable and growing.
• [00:26:31.46] SPEAKER 2: Any numbers?
• [00:26:32.97] BEN HUH: Any numbers? No.
• [00:26:35.06] [LAUGHTER] Anyone else? Yes, back there.
• [00:26:38.28] SPEAKER 3: [INAUDIBLE] But how do you come up with the new ideas for your websites and blogging?
• [00:26:49.24] BEN HUH: So we've got a fan of Failbooking.com, and she's asking -- how do you come up with these new ideas? That's a very interesting question. They strike me at any moment. Like literally I could be standing here looking at you guys and going -- "You know, I could take a website of people staring at each other, and just analyze their faces." It's literally just like that. So I'll go to our spreadsheet that we keep in the cloud -- the Gooogle Cloud -- and I'll put that on idea. And then a bunch of our moderators -- there's about a dozen different people who work on the editorial team -- and they'll comment on it, and they'lll say -- "Ah, that sucks." Or -- "Hey, that seems like a really interesting idea, here's a few photos that I found that I think are related to that." And so we'll sit there and refine that. Of the 150 ideas that are on the sheet right now, one or two make it to the top. And that's what we work on for the next week's launch. So, yeah.
• [00:27:37.01] Yes?
• [00:27:37.52] SPEAKER 4: I have a friend from a small European Studies program who moved to Seattle and made $10 or $11 million in a dot-com in 1999. And living in Seattle, she decided she'd go into politics. So she ran against Senator Slade Gorton for the US Senate, and her name is Maria Cantwell.
• [00:27:58.34] BEN HUH: Hey!
• [00:27:59.46] SPEAKER 4: And my question to you is, what are you going to do with your $10 million?
• [00:28:03.38] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:28:04.36] BEN HUH: The question is, what will I do with all the money I make from posting cat photos online? I actually have a list of things that I want to accomplish in my life on my website. And I'll probably try to do those. First pay off my house, and all that stuff.
• [00:28:17.98] Yes?
• [00:28:18.29] SPEAKER 5: When you started your site, and you launch it, how do you seed the marketspace so people know it's been started.
• [00:28:27.56] BEN HUH: When we start a new website, how do we get it started with the content and with the traffic? One of the most common questions that I get is -- "I've got this brand new blog, how do I get traffic?" And my honest answer is -- "I don't know, I bought my way into it. So maybe you can go buy something."
• [00:28:43.09] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:28:43.84] So that's actually the only thing that we know. So what we actually start out with is content. We absolutely want to to make sure that the content that shows up on that site is within the expectations that you have, but acts like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get, but you know it's going to be chocolate related. It's the same thing we do. On Failbooking, we know it's going to be Facebook-related, but we don't really know what's going to show up. That's kind of half the fun. And that's what we do. And then for traffic, we actually link to it from our other blogs. So we have the ability to actually market internally to our 14 million people who visit every month.
• [00:29:17.92] Yes?
• [00:29:18.26] SPEAKER 6: What's your favorite website, and do you have a favorite picture [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:29:25.06] BEN HUH: So the question is, what is my favorite website. And the second question is, what's my favorite within that website. So I'm assuming you're talking about one of our websites. My favorite's still I Can Has Cheezburger. It's the one that I save till the end of the day. It's not the one I go back to every five minutes -- that one I'm worried, because I'm in business. What I do is I save I Can Has Cheezburger for the end of the day when I'm about to wrap up, and it's going to put a smile on my face before I go home. That's what's really important to me. And then secondarily, my favorite photo is actually a kitten with ear hair -- it's got hair coming out of its ear holes. And he's sitting like this in a wine glass. He's actually literally in a glass on a bar, and the caption says -- "Send me with my compliments to the ladies."
• [00:30:09.93] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:30:12.81] I don't know what about it that I really love, but I just saw it and I go -- "Ah, that is so clever. I wish I were that clever." Not a single one of my captions has ever made it to the homepage.
• [00:30:22.14] [LAUGHTER] Yes?
• [00:30:26.76] SPEAKER 7: With all your websites you have users uploading content. Do you have custom programs or do you use an off-the-shelf script? Or what do you use?
• [00:30:36.48] BEN HUH: So what do we use to publish our content? So there's actually two halves to our platform. One is WordPress, which is the publishing platform we use to actually show the content. And the second platform is the platform that we use to generate the content -- to help people build it, for them to save it, and such. We spend the vast majority of our efforts on this latter part, which is what makes us different. Anybody can create WordPress to create a blog. We use it a little bit differently, we use it as a publishing platform. But what really makes us different is the fact that anyone can show up, upload a photo, add a caption, and regardless of who submitted what, we review it to make sure it's appropriate for the website. For example, I Can Has Cheezburger -- everything on there has to be family friendly. So we enforce those laws within our community. That's what really makes us different. So we spend the vast majority of our time building our custom code for that.
• [00:31:27.57] Yes?
• [00:31:27.84] SPEAKER 8: Are you ever concerned about the site's integrity becoming too low brow?
• [00:31:32.50] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:31:33.32] BEN HUH: I'm sorry. The question is, am I concerned about being too low brow? And my answer is -- absolutely not. And that's a great question. A lot of people have accused us of taking memes, and kind of destroying it by publishing it to the masses. And my response is -- memes are born to be shared with people. For more people to participate. What makes a meme interesting is the fact that you can take your idea and impress it upon on the meme to change it, affect it, and make it your own. So that, in essence, tells me that it's more like a democracy. So therefore if democracy is the highest order of political structure, then what we do will also be the highest order of content structure. More people participating in a fair and transparent system will make the content better for the masses. So that's my long way of saying that.
• [00:32:26.43] Any other questions? Yes, back there.
• [00:32:27.89] SPEAKER 9: You mentioned before that when you have a site [INAUDIBLE] kinks worked out of it, and if it's not funny you take it down. I'm wondering, how long do you usually give the webiste to see if going to pan out?
• [00:32:41.03] BEN HUH: How long do we give a website time before we decide it's a success or failure? That's a good question. It varies anywhere from two weeks to a year and a half. And the reason it varies is because we're looking for a community. We're not looking for a specific type of traffic, we never say if you don't hit these traffic numbers we'll shut it down. It's not a matter of traffic, it's a matter of finding a small group of people who are so passionate about that website they will continue to create content and share it with other people.
• [00:33:08.78] I'm going to actually take this back to the business question that was asked, which is about our revenue numbers and things like that. And I know we say we're very proud of the fact that we're profitable in this recession. But a lot of a good business is good fortune -- comes from good luck. And one of the incredible luck things going for us is that compared to -- being in Michigan -- General Motors. Unlike General Motors, which has to buy its supplies, pay its employees to create the products, go out and sell and market it. We have none of those expenses. We do not have to pay for our content, we do not have to pay anyone to create that content, we do not have to pay anyone to market that content. It is no surprise that we are profitable. We have none of the costs that saddle a traditional business. All of our costs go back to creating this community, and making sure that they're happy and having fun. That is the core of our businesses. It's not really even publishing. People see us as a publisher -- "You make money from ads, therefore you must be a publisher." But at the end of the day, it's seeing all of you show up and be curious about this company that tells us that we are doing something right.
• [00:34:13.21] Yes?
• [00:34:13.58] SPEAKER 10: So your income is advertising?
• [00:34:15.70] BEN HUH: Yeah, so I'll break down our percentage of income. Most of our income is advertising. The second largest group is our book publishing -- so we've published four books now, of which two have been on the New York Times Bestseller List. And those two books, based on I Can Has Cheezburger, are a collection of photos with misspelled captions of cats -- which is something you can find on our website for free.
• [00:34:38.43] SPEAKER 11: Do people give their rights away when they --
• [00:34:43.58] BEN HUH: Actually, when you upload a photo to our website, you provide us with permission to use it in certain ways. So we don't actually quote-unquote take somebody's rights -- that's called a rights assignment. So that's when you actually say -- you no longer have the right, and we do. What websites do when you actually upload a photo in most cases, is they have a license to use it from you.
• [00:35:02.46] Any other questions? Yes.
• [00:35:03.69] SPEAKER 12: [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:35:16.38] BEN HUH: So, will user-generated content become more influential or less influential, is the question that I'm going to answer. It'll become absolutely, positively more influential -- only if filtering becomes better. The fact that we all produce content, doesn't mean it's Shakespeare. We still need an infinite number of people to produce Shakespeare, because we're a bunch of monkeys producing whatever it is. We still need that guidance, and the filtering, in our case, is provided not by an expert, but by the community themselves. So if I produce a piece of content, I will be judged by my peers. They vote up and down on the voting page, and then therefore the best ones make it to the homepage, with a few caveats from our actual editors who sit there. Now, this is what enables user-generated content to become more powerful over time. The fact that we're producing more content actually has a devaluing effect on content itself. We just produce more and more stuff, the market does not have any demand for it, therefore it goes down the hill. What we have to make sure is that, if we produce content there's a mechanism that tells you -- this is appropriate or better than other. Which assigns value, and that value gets translated into market, because people want to spread it somebody else. So yes, I think overall it'll become a much more important piece of culture today. And that's where I'm going with the idea of TV in the 1950s -- internet culture will be to our kids, or young people today, over the long-term. Because we have changed the way we understand what media is. Because younger people today spend so much time on the internet, the old paradigm of one way broadcast TV no longer applies. If you don't interact with other people's content, it is no longer valuable. It used to be that you didn't have to interact with something to be valuable, but today it does. And that ship has already sailed. And everybody else -- the entire media industry's -- trying to figure out what that really means to them.
• [00:37:07.73] I had a question in the back. Yes?
• [00:37:11.09] SPEAKER 13: [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:37:15.07] BEN HUH: How many people do I work with? We just hired our 32nd full-time person. So, there's 32 of us.
• [00:37:21.91] I'm going to skip you for a little bit, there's another person back there.
• [00:37:24.45] SPEAKER 14: [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:37:34.10] BEN HUH: How long? We were in trouble since the day we started. Let me give you that answer. One of the interesting things about what we do is that we are in this grey area of a thing called copyright. Anybody can upload any photo, whether they have the right or not, to our website. The United States of America, God bless this country, because we have this little law -- which is very controversial in many aspects -- but we have this little clause, a law called the DMCA -- Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Which states that the service provider -- the company that provides a specific type of service -- is not liable for the actions of it users. That's all it says. This huge law -- there's on line in there -- which protects service providers. What we do is, we provide a service that allows people to upload any photo and add a caption. And that is really important to us, because that allows everyone else in the world to use our tools to create new speech. And I know that sounds kind of legal, and kind of out of touch, but I went to London and I was talking to the Guardian Newspaper, one of their big newspapers in London, and they said -- "We have this huge problem. We don't know what to do with comments. People say whatever they want in these comments, and we have to go delete them. We have to spend all this time managing what people say because we'll be liable if we let it through. So we turned off commenting." Huh. That stopped my heart. Because the business felt they were liable for the actions of its users, it prohibited speech. Wow, that is absolutely incredible. In this country, that is not true. And that's what allows us to say things like -- "Hey Guiness Book of World Records, you're wrong." We have this right called fair speech -- we can criticize a piece of work. Anyway, that's a long way of saying -- "Yeah, we've been in trouble all this time, but we kind of like it that way."
• [00:39:32.11] Yes?
• [00:39:32.39] SPEAKER 15: [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:39:48.35] BEN HUH: So the question is, how do we compete with everybody else trying to ask users to create more content? The first big advantage we have is a thing called traffic. It's an enormous hurdle for other people who are getting started to overcome. But it is overcomable. People have done it, Facebook is giant, we're just a tiny little sliver. What really prohibits other people is that we create tiny -- we are actually focused on creating as small of a community as we can. In order to drive this giant network of 14 million people, we actually focus on creating a tiny little space where a few people can love what they do. And that kind of love is infectious. If you love something -- "I'm a fan of knitting. I'm going to tell all my friends that they should pick up knitting." There's been a resurgence of knitting in the United States for the last 10 years. It wasn't because a giant company that had a lot of yarn in a storage house decided -- "Ah, you know you should all knit." It didn't happen that way, it was grassroots. That's what we try to replicate, and it's actually very difficult to do that. So that's what we're good at. But whereas competition -- happens all the time. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. We'd like to win -- we're very competitive -- but there's nothing stopping anyone from doing this. We just happen to be really good at it.
• [00:41:00.08] Other question up here?
• [00:41:01.21] SPEAKER 16: [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:41:12.69] BEN HUH: Yes, we do. We actually have more than that. If you go to cheezburger, cheezburger.com -- there was no question there, but I'm going to answer it anyway -- you'll see the stats of the currently active number of photos in the archive, currently active number of users registered for site, and such. It's in the millions, actually. And some photos have probably been uploaded 10,000 times.
• [00:41:38.57] Yes?
• [00:41:38.84] SPEAKER 17: You said worked for a Fortune 500 company. [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:41:48.54] BEN HUH: So the question is, did I take any skills away from the corporate world? I actually had a client who was a Fortune 500 company, so I actually worked for a pretty small firm -- but that's OK. It's actually a very valid question, because even though we were a company of 30 people, I think, we acted like a corporation. The lessons that I learned were to what not to do in my company. It was absolutely incredible and eye-opening to learn those lessons, because I'd always been a start-up guy. I'd always loved working in a smaller environment, entrepreneurial -- places where you can innovate, fail and try it again. All those things I learned from corporations were the opposite of what I wanted -- the politics, the defensiveness, the "I show up to work because I just want a paycheck." I just didn't like that. So when I started my own company, I wanted to do specifically the opposite of that. How do I get people who love what they do, who love the mission of the company? So when people started telling me in person or over email -- we didn't have a mission statement, and they said -- "You know I go to your website, and" -- there's actually this one lady that sent me a very touching email. "I print out your website every day" -- and I was really alarmed by the number of trees being killed. And she said, "I print out your pictures every day, and I go to my grandmother. And she's recovering from cancer in the hospital. She doesn't have internet access, she doesn't know how to use the internet, but I show her these photos and it brightens her day." And that really touched me. I said, OK we're on to something here. And I heard it again and again, in different people in different ways, and where they said -- "You are the five minutes of happiness that I get in my drudgery of work. " So we adopted that as our mission. If that's what our users are already telling us, why have a different mission? They already like what we do, we just needed to clarify it. So our mission became -- make people happy for five minutes a day. And it doesn't seem like rocket science. We're not curing cancer, we're not saving any lives, but it seems to have a real impact on the people who visit the site.
• [00:43:41.82] Yes, over here.
• [00:43:42.80] SPEAKER 18: Do the companies that advertise on your website, did they come to you at a certain point? Or did you go to them? How did you get the advertising?
• [00:43:54.27] BEN HUH: Sure. How did we get the advertising for the website? We are one of the largest wholesalers of ad inventory in the world. I'll explain that. There are two ways to really make money with ads on the internet. One, you sell it yourself -- "Hey hey Coca Cola, I've got this website. I'd like you to buy some ad inventory." It's called direct sales. The second is -- "Hey Google, I know that you have ad inventory, you can show it on my site and I'll take a cut, and you can take a cut." We mostly do the second part of that, which is we wholesale our inventory to a bunch of ad networks, who then resell it to their clients. So we don't have a salesperson at all in the company.
• [00:44:28.40] SPEAKER 18: At what point when you first started did [INAUDIBLE] At what point can you get advertising?
• [00:44:37.32] BEN HUH: Yeah, where can you start with advertising? So, we started out -- I mean, it was being owned by somebody else -- but they put ads relatively early on in the company's history. It generates a few bucks a day, it doesn't really add up over time. Only when you reach a huge scale of websites do you start to actually generate significant dollars. So it wasn't until we reached about 500,000 pages a day, which was when I bought the website, that you could sustain one employee salary. It takes an enormous scale.
• [00:45:07.88] Yes?
• [00:45:08.37] SPEAKER 19: Do you and the other [INAUDIBLE] employees have an actual physical office space grouped together? [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:45:15.25] BEN HUH: So, what's our office like? It's about this big, it's filled with cat litter, and everybody is trying to wrestle down a cat to put a caption on it. No. We have about a 1,500 square foot office that we're sub-leasing from another company. There's actually a video on YouTube, it's called Behind the Scenes at FAIL Blog -- which has actually been seen millions of time. And all of the comments are like -- "Wow, you don't work out your mom's basement?"
• [00:45:39.07] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:45:40.16] It's actually true, that's like half the comments. Everybody gets a two foot by four foot folding table -- including myself -- so there's about 20-some of us in the office, and we have employees. One in Indiana, a couple in Texas. One he's from New York, but he lives in Poland now. One in LA, one in Vancouver. So all over the country, too, but most of them are actually out of our office in the shadows of the Space Needle -- literally, I can go out the door and see the Space Needle. What a cliche for Seattle, right? So that's where we are, and we all sit out in the open space. It's pretty egalitarian, if not spartan.
• [00:46:18.24] Yes?
• [00:46:18.51] SPEAKER 20: Do you have an office cat?
• [00:46:20.74] BEN HUH: Do I have an office cat? We do not. We have lots of employees with cats. We sometimes bring my dog in, and he doesn't know what to do so he climbs on things, which is very cat-like.
• [00:46:35.26] Yes, back there.
• [00:46:36.30] SPEAKER 21: Do you know if there are any translations of lolspeak in other languages?
• [00:46:42.46] BEN HUH: Are there translations of lolspeak in other languages? I was invited to a conference in Brazil. I was like -- great, free trip to Brazil! So I went, and I said -- "What do you guys know about our network? You guys speak Portuguese, and we speak English." And they said -- "Oh, don't worry. Internet is universal." I was like, "Really?" They're like -- "Yeah, people here say the word 'fail', even though they don't speak English."
• [00:47:05.91] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:47:06.41] Apparently, the word "fail" kind of sounds like "feo", which is in Portuguese "ugly". So apparently it translates. So it actually turns out that the internet, which is shrinking the world and actually making it diverse at the same time, has this universal effect in the way it impacts on our culture.
• [00:47:22.75] So there is no other language for lolspeak, but apparently we don't need one.
• [00:47:28.90] Yes?
• [00:47:29.22] SPEAKER 22: You talked about community a lot tonight -- [INAUDIBLE] Do you see any potential for leveraging community in the future that really hasn't been utilized yet?
• [00:47:42.20] BEN HUH: Is there a new way to leverage community in the future? Absolutely. We are literally -- we are scratching the tip of an iceberg. That's how far we've come when it comes to internet as to harnessing a community. There are companies today creating software, techniques, and ways to have communities do ever more complex things. Because the very first thing you do with a community is to do one thing, one variable. You test the one variable, if they do it then you move on to the second variable. So as the internet becomes faster and more powerful, and more people do things on the internet and also become culturally comfortable with sharing their information and content on the internet, the possibilities of doing something greater increases geometrically. It wouldn't be out of the question for people to cross-source a large piece of machinery a few years down the road. In fact, that's already started. I have a friend who runs a company called the MakerBot. What he does is, he creates little kits that you can put together that allows people to create 3-d objects. You can literally print an item using software. I don't if you guys remember -- some of you may know this -- back in the 1970s when the computer revolution was getting started, you would buy a kit computer from the mail order. And this is an exact analogy. A lot of those pieces are cross-sourced. One person will make a widget, somebody else will make another piece of tool, and you actually print the two items together, put it together, and you have a piece of machinery. It's absolutely phenomenal what people can do.
• [00:49:17.11] Yes, you had a question back there? No? Yes, back there?
• [00:49:20.32] SPEAKER 23: [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:49:52.91] BEN HUH: So the question is, because of the amount of content that flows through our system, have you considered an automated algorithmic system like Digg.com? If you're not familiar with Digg, what happens is people submit links to Digg, and people vote on what they like and what they don't like -- what they believe is newsworthy. And based on a specific secret algorithm they will put the most popular from that hour to the top of their page and such. So it's called social news -- social media aggregation. Have we considered that? Absolutely. We've actually tried it, and what we found is that one of the problems that we have with a completely automated system, is that we have no control over the guidance of that community. We're at the mercy of the masses, and somebody can actually come in and influence the system in a way that we don't like. So what we decided was -- this is incredibly expensive, half of our company is devoted to the task of filtering content. So if a bunch of people decided that they wanted to see something risque on I Can Has Cheezburger?, they can literally hack the system to a point where they can have that show up automatically. Whereas with our current structure that it is impossible. Every piece of content that shows up on the homepage of I Can Has Cheezburger? has been filtered three times. Once by the person who screens all images and categories them. Second, by the community through a voting system. So there's a voting page that you can actually use to actually indicate what you like and don't like. And third, by a professional editor who screens all the stuff that the users have decided is of high quality, and decides what to put on the hompage. This is really cost-intensive, but we feel that this is a unique structure that makes our community better than others.
• [00:51:25.50] Any other questions? Yes, back there.
• [00:51:26.68] SPEAKER 24: [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:51:31.92] BEN HUH: How long does it take to go from something that's submitted, that people like, to the homepage? It literally takes anywhere from hours to weeks.
• [00:51:37.85] SPEAKER 24: [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:51:39.03] BEN HUH: Oh. I could literally come up with an idea today, make a phone call, and it'll be up next week. The turnaround from an idea to an actual website -- that's the question -- it can be incredibly fast. We've actually tried a test. We saw a trending topic on Twitter, and we decided that we wanted to turn it into a website. It took us two hours. We can literally respond with the news. Unfortunately, I wasn't watching the VMA, so the whole Kayne West thing -- Taylor Swift -- I wasn't watching it, so the next morning I woke up and there was like six websites already. We're like -- "Ah, forget it. Too late."
• [00:52:17.83] Any other questions? Yes.
• [00:52:18.72] SPEAKER 25: What's to keep from having websites with pornography or people using drugs or --
• [00:52:24.04] BEN HUH: What keeps the really bad stuff out? The answer is, there's people. We have paid staffers who look at this stuff, and they'll just reject it if it doesn't meet our editorial guidelines.
• [00:52:37.24] There's a question?
• [00:52:39.99] SPEAKER 26: How did you hire, and how did you get the people that you have?
• [00:52:43.57] BEN HUH: How did we hire, and get the people we had? We posted ads on craigslist.
• [00:52:47.61] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:52:48.70] Actually, we started out pretty small. We posted some ads on craigslist -- it worked, we got a few applicants. And then one day I got frustrated and said, "Look, we're a lolspeak-based website, so I'm going to write a job listing that says -- 'You don't need to know how to spell to work here. Please apply'". The position's based out of Seattle. The Associated Press and the Washington Post picked it up, and said -- "In this economy you can get a job without knowing how to spell. News at 9:00!" We received 1,000 applicants from across the world -- across the world! It was literally just rejecting the entire pile, because we couldn't go through that. So, you know -- feast or famine, I guess.
• [00:53:22.34] But we're getting pretty good at it. People know who we are in Seattle. We're actually the largest start-up in Seattle in terms of traffic, so we've actually gotten a bit of notoriety. Actually, it's pretty funny. I tend to kind of say things that sometimes I regret -- like most of us -- and it gets picked up in the news. So that's kind of weird. But that allows us to generate enough applicants to actually hire -- we get an average of 150 applicants per job.
• [00:53:49.16] Any other questions?
• [00:53:49.73] SPEAKER 27: What are you looking for --
• [00:53:50.89] BEN HUH: What are we looking for in our positions? What are we looking for? So our job applications -- because we have so many people -- go through a system that you have to upload your resume, and fill out a bunch of questionnaires. And there's usually 10 questions per job applicant. The questions focus on two things. One -- what are your values, things that are inherent to you that isn't learned at a job? Second thing -- what are your skills, what do you know how to do? The most important part of those two sets is the values. What do you like doing? How were you raised? Those things are really important to us, because chances are you didn't earn a degree in cat picture screening.
• [00:54:35.94] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:54:37.33] And no one has told you how to nurture an online community. We're going to have to teach you that anyway. So what we're interested in is people who believe in the same things that we believe -- no matter what your background is, no matter what your education is. I don't care where you went to school. I don't care that your last job was a bank teller or a dishwasher. I care that you're smart enough to answer those questions to the best of your abilities, and that you share the same values of putting users first, and working hard to make sure that happens. And that's most important to us. Now there's technical jobs that require a very different set of skills, but half of our company's based on that 10 question questionnaire.
• [00:55:14.77] Yes, back there.
• [00:55:15.89] SPEAKER 28: [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:55:31.23] BEN HUH: What top three things do I suggest they consider? This is the do as I say, not as I do portion of the Q&A. I was actually born and raised in Korea for the first 11 years of my life, where math, science, and all the things that make an Asian country Asian, were taught.
• [00:55:50.76] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:55:51.63] Let's be honest. And then I moved Hong Kong, and then I learned English. I actually spoke the Queen's English. Of course, I lost that when I came to the United States -- very unfortunate. I came to the States when I was 14 -- a sophomore in high school. The thing that struck me the most was that kids didn't spend enough time in school, or reading, or didn't really seem to care as much. And that really shocked me. And then by the time I got to college, I had lost all the advantages of coming from a system that was really highly focused on education. And when I got to college -- I went to Northwestern, I went to their journalism program, which is a very selective program -- and I had to compete with kids that went to private schools on the East Coast. They knew who Kafka was. They knew high grade physics. Things that I was not prepared to even know about, they knew. I actually had no idea what a fraternity was until my sophomore year in college. I'm like - "Oh!" There was no Wikipedia to help me. I don't know what the magical future holds, but really find something that they're passionate about, and turn it into a real lifelong curiosity. And that's really the best -- like, I hated math and science. The first thing I did when I realized that the journalism degree did not require me to take any math classes -- it just need to statistics, which is like math light. I was like -- "Oh, I took stats." Didn't need to take any more math. I really like publishing. That's what I really enjoyed. I liked communicating, I liked, ironically, writing in English -- it's the second language that I speak, not even my first language. But that really made me curious about the world, so that's what I did.
• [00:57:33.05] Yes? Yes.
• [00:57:34.53] SPEAKER 29: [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:57:44.54] BEN HUH: Oh, wow. That's not a problem. I am perfectly fine with people taking books and not actually buying them to read -- we're in a library.
• [00:57:50.69] SPEAKER 29: But I had broken my ribs that week, and it was the hardest thing --
• [00:57:55.51] [LAUGHING]
• [00:57:58.41] SPEAKER 29: [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:58:06.76] BEN HUH: That's the first time somebody has told me that book has caused them enough pain to cry.
• [00:58:09.63] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:58:11.24] SPEAKER 29: It was a good pain, so thank you.
• [00:58:12.84] BEN HUH: You're welcome.
• [00:58:14.39] [LAUGHTER] Yes?
• [00:58:17.03] SPEAKER 30: What's a meme? Why is that important?
• [00:58:19.97] BEN HUH: I'm sorry, maybe I glossed it over. What is a meme? It is spelled, meme. It was coined by a science fiction writer back in the mid-1970s. The definition of a meme is an idea that is propagated from person to person. Think of a revolution. The meme of a revolution is the idea in which they're fighting for. In internet parlance, meme is a piece of content that people contribute to the framework of the content. So I Can Has Cheezburger is the leading site for the meme called lolcats. Lolcats are pictures of cats -- mostly, some animals -- that have a misspelled or funny caption on it. That's all it is -- it's the framework for this type of content.
• [00:59:01.08] Yes, back there?
• [00:59:01.98] SPEAKER 31: Do you have a favorite meme other than lolcats?
• [00:59:04.80] BEN HUH: Do I have a favorite meme other than lolcats? Actually, I loved it so much I built a site around it -- which is GraphJam. I came from the corporate world. Often we would use an Excel spreadsheet to do things that it wasn't supposed to do. And I was very happy to find other people who shared the same passion.
• [00:59:23.62] Yes?
• [00:59:24.02] SPEAKER 32: [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:59:34.82] BEN HUH: That's right, yeah.
• [00:59:36.04] SPEAKER 32: [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:59:44.06] BEN HUH: So the question is, how do we trendspot? Most of the things that we do have a basis somewhere else. Somebody said -- a great person, I'm sure, because it was carved in a rock somewhere -- "Good artists borrow, the best ones steal."
• [01:00:01.65] SPEAKER 33: Picasso said that.
• [01:00:03.23] BEN HUH: Picasso said that? The reason I didn't know who said that was because the great graffiti artist from London, named Banksy, crossed out Picasso's name apparently, and wrote his name underneath it. So it's a very clever thing -- and that in and of itself, is a whole new meme. So what was the question again?
• [01:00:26.37] Oh, how do I trendspot? Huh. I probably consume more media than is healthy for a normal human being. I just look at enough internet content. And actually it's gotten easier over time, where people send me stuff and I don't have to look for them anymore. I just kind of sit back and let the emails come in. So I've actually got even better at it, no thanks to myself.
• [01:00:51.56] SPEAKER 34: Do you have employees where their job is to [? find them? ?]
• [01:00:55.37] BEN HUH: Do I have employees whose job -- no, we don't have employees whose job's to go out and find trends, because we hire people who are going to do that anyway. So it's like their passion to go home at night and surf the internet for funny stuff, and they come in the next morning and will be like -- "Hey, I saw this yesterday" or "My friend sent me this, we should try it." When you hire the right people who share the same visions, they're not really working. They're just having fun with a paycheck.
• [01:01:21.35] Any other questions? All right. Well, if that's it. Thank you very much.
• [01:01:25.96] [APPLAUSE]
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