Cheezburger, the pioneering online comedy network that brought cat pictures and outrageous videos to millions around the world, has been sold to an undisclosed, newly-formed private media company, GeekWire has learned. The Cheezburger brand and network of sites will continue, and the company’s 14 employees will remain in Seattle as they continue to chronicle wackiness from around the Web on sites such as This is Photobomb, My Little Brony and, of course, I Can Has Cheezburger. In an interview with GeekWire, Cheezburger CEO Scott Moore declined to name the buyer or the purchase price, though he did confirm that the terms of the acquisition were signed on Sunday. A GeekWire source said that the newly-formed media company that agreed to buy Cheezburger is based overseas. “Really, the strategy is to build a millennial media powerhouse,” said Moore. “And put together several brands that are complementary and leverage both the economies of scale that we get on the cost side and the economies of scale that we get on the sell side with advertisers, and also use a variety of different sites that are strong on their own to cross promote one another.”
He added: “Scale is everything in media.” Cheezburger now attracts about 13 million unique visitors per month, with about half of that traffic coming from the U.S. That’s down significantly from a few years ago. The Cheezburger sites will make up the majority of the traffic of the new media company, which will now boast about 20 million monthly unique visitors. One of the reasons why the company did not want to be identified is that it continues to gobble up other online media properties, and it did not want those deals to be hampered because of publicity. Moore will continue to run Cheezburger, though his exact title within the new company has not yet been determined. “We have just been heads down on getting this deal done,” said Moore, who first started shopping the Cheezburger network to potential buyers last summer. At least one other offer was made, but Moore said that acquiring company just made more sense. The acquisition marks the latest chapter for the Seattle company, which was formed by Ben Huh in 2007 after he purchased the I Can Has Cheezburger?
Huh, with the help of his wife Emily, went on to create a network of comedy sites including Fail Blog, Know Your Meme, The Daily What and dozens of other sites. At its peak in 2010, the sites attracted more than 375 million views per month as the company refined its mission of “giving the world 5 minutes of happiness a day.” But the happiness faded at Cheezburger in recent years. The company, which raised $30 million in venture funding in 2011 from Madrona and Foundry Group, struggled to make the shift to a mobile world. Traffic to the Web sites sunk, and competition for viewers ratcheted up as dozens of mobile-friendly media sites produced attention-grabbing content in the online humor arena. “Mobile continues to grow, but the revenue we generate from it is significantly less,” Huh told GeekWire in 2013 following a 35 percent layoff at the company. “We want to take this year and think about how we can generate similar returns in mobile, or else you are going to have the case of one part of your platform subsidizing the other.”
Huh added at the time: “I want to build a long-term business. I am not here to pump up the numbers, and sell it next year.” A year later Huh wrote an in-depth blog post about the problems the once-scrappy startup encountered after taking on the $30 million venture round, with the CEO blaming himself for the missteps and noting that the company had turned into a “confused, money-losing mess.” Huh stepped down as CEO last summer, handing the reins to Moore, an experienced former MSN executive and Slate publisher who joined the company in 2013 as COO. Moore set on a course of repositioning Cheezburger and halting its traffic slump, something he said started occur late last year as traffic started to increase again for the first time in many years. He also dramatically reduced costs, lopping off about 70 percent of the costs of the company in the past two years. In 2013, the company employed about 65 people. Moore declined to go into specifics of the acquisition and whether it marked a positive financial deal for investors, saying only that the major investors on the board felt like it was “a good outcome.”
More recently, Cheezburger encountered troubles as users installed ad-blocking software, cutting off a significant revenue stream for the company. “We know many of you don’t like ads with your Cheezburger,” the company wrote in a blog post from last September encouraging users to turn off their ad blockers. “But those ads pay for our servers and the salaries of our staff. We’ve put a ton of effort into making Cheezburger and KnowYourMeme faster to load. We do our best to eliminate bad ads, like those that start audio automatically. But the stark truth is that advertising is our life blood…. If our ads are blocked, we can’t afford to put out the product.” In fact, one of the big reasons why Cheezburger sold was due to a changing online advertising climate. Even at 13 million monthly visitors, the Cheezburger network was not big enough to attract large brand advertisers. “We needed to get bigger,” said Moore, adding the the acquiring company “liked the idea of scaling up” to create a much larger media entity.
If you see someone on Twitter or Tumblr discussing “shipping,” don’t assume they’re talking aboutThe term has taken on new life thanks to people, predominantly teens, using the word to discuss ideal relationships between fictional characters, celebrities, and even Once I start shipping a tv couple or real life partnership/friendship/relationship that it,I'll ship them forever! ❤️ mine are all perfect! — Nicole (@NicoleKarenM) October 4, 2013 Shipping originated in the world of fandoms, which are groups of hardcore fans of movies, books, and television shows. According to the ridiculousy comprehensive fandom slang guides of the internet, the word derives from "relationshipper," typically shortened to just "shipper." Relationshippers are people who care deeply about the romantic relationships between their favorite characters — and sometimes, celebrities or even the people in their own lives. So instead of saying, "Romeo and Juliet are a perfect couple," a
Shakespeare-loving shipper would say, "I ship Romeo and Juliet." "To say, ‘I ship that couple,’ is a short way for someone to say that they believe in a couple, that they’re rooting for them to succeed,” Michael, my friend's 15-year-old brother who is a high school sophomore from New Jersey, told Tech Insider. “The term has evolved in teenage slang to become a widespread part of our vocabulary." A quick Twitter search for the phrase “I ship them” will show you just how widespread the term has become, with thousands of people all over the world tweeting about their favorite couples. I ship them so much 😻 @/xvRsb03jRc — Becky (@oIzanski_Seb) August 3, 2015 /4753TMxHhS — Leigh Anne (@harrysdizzle) July 25, 2015 “Kids often use the word when talking about [characters from] TV shows and movies, but it’s also become a slang term for describing any two people that you want to get together,” Michael
In a sense, some people were shipping over 100 years ago, according to Know Your hey just weren't calling it that. I Friends, New Fancies” featured characters from Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” re-imagined in new relationships. Today, ships have gone digital. Since the mid-aughts, shipping has become common in the world of online fan fiction, where people create stories based on beloved characters from TV shows, movies, and books. A for shipping was added to Urban Dictionary in 2005. If you were a fan of the Harry Potter series, for example, "you could say, ‘I ship Hermione Granger and Harry Potter,'” Michael In case you’re not a Potter fan, Harry and Hermione don’t wind up together at the end of the series. Shippers of the pair believe that the two wizards should have ended up together. entire Tumblr community devoted listing reasons why Harry and Hermione are meant for each other. “Ships are all about your imagination, so they could be
impossible or completely realistic,” Gabby, a childhood friend and high school senior from Massachusetts, told TI. For example, celebrity couple Kim Kardashian West and Kanye West are one of the hottest “real-life ships” around right now, she /fIVPh0MZIZ — The Fandom (@xTheFandom) April 16, 2014 As for an “impossible ship,” Gabby says one of the most popular at her school is “Larry Stylinson,” a fictional coupling of One Direction band members Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles. #/OdRsZIbkfZ — U cant drag me down! ( Shipping isn’t limited to fictional characters and celebrities. Teenagers are also starting to use the verb to talk about each “Fans will still ship more than other teens, but lately I've seen it [shipping] leaking more into normal teenage conversation,” Michael told TI. For Gabby and her classmates, saying "I ship you two" is the teenage equivalent of saying two people would make a