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What's working, exactly, is a series of viral humor sites intended simply "to make people happy for five minutes a day," as Huh puts it. Huh, 31, a journalist turned dotcom entrepreneur, was born in South Korea and moved to California when he was in his teens. He launched Pet Holdings in 2007 when angel investors helped him buy a new website called I Can Has Cheezburger?, which is a compendium of "Lolcats," laugh-out-loud feline photos captioned in "kitty pidgin," or artfully misspelled imaginings of cats' inner monologues. (The original Lolcat features a fat gray fur ball...
Speaking to the Times this year - and echoing what he told the Guardian staff and some 1,000 techies at the 2008 Future of Web Apps Expo in London - Huh said the key to making a site take off is connecting it to a cultural phenomenon. I Can Has Cheezburger?, for instance, pokes fun at an oft-maligned, inscrutable household pet, appealing to cat lovers and others. (Huh is allergic.) FAIL Blog has helped popularize fail as both a noun and an exclamation, not to mention an easier-to-spell synonym for schadenfreude. Another site, This is Photobomb, gives...
...moment you see something like a Photobomb happen, we want you to think of our site," he says. And people do: only a quarter of his users find their way to Huh's blogs through miscellaneous links or social-networking sites such as StumbleUpon and Facebook. The other 75% head directly to his sites, either typing in the URLs or searching for them via Google...
More than anything else, Huh seems to have a knack for nailing the zeitgeist. Any of his sites, after all, could easily have become yet another passing online craze. (Remember the Numa Numa Guy?) Pet Holdings' page views, however, are growing at an annual clip of 300%. Huh admits some sites fall flat: "There's stuff you will never even hear about because it sucks so bad." For example, My Wedding is a Big Deal!, an assortment of bridal fails, Photobombs and other snafus, didn't quite gel. Another contender, called That's So Racist - for posting public examples...
...what's the secret of Huh's success? Part of the charm of his sites is that they appear to be put together by rank amateurs. "It's on purpose," says Huh. Actually, they're carefully cultivated by 20 staffers, mostly Seattle-based, including a lapsed lawyer and a former investment banker. The company is hiring roughly one staffer a month and gets some 100 applications for every position. Applicants should not offend easily and must have held a job they hated, says Huh, to better appreciate the joys of spending their days perusing funny photos. Plus, he says...