Hello all,
This morning in the subway I read Wired's article on
Cheezburger Network [wired.com]
WW has all the best advice on how to make your site work, but very few people share their business strategies, which is completely normal, no-one would tell the world the recipe of their secret sauce.
That's why I enjoy coming up on an article in professional magazines, where the history of a company is laid out, and it's business model somewhat revealed.
But everything I learned in the article, I have read about on this forum but in separate threads over the years.
So Cheezburger Network was started as a purchase, not from the ground up.
Then the strategy is to start many different but somewhat complementary sites. Probably they are inter-linked, to drive views and SEs to each other.
Since it launched, the Cheezburger Network has successfully aggregated more than 30 sites.
and
Huh has about 150 other ideas in development and about 1,000 registered domain names.
Content is mostly user generated and aggregated from free sources (YouTube, etc...), but the company creates some of it's content too.
Of course, Huh can’t take all of the credit for Cheezburger’s success. In fact, he owes quite a bit to the millions of anonymous Web dwellers whose work he corrals, curates, and posts.
Finally, money making is diversified, both ads and e-commerce:
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
