Silly cats are big business

Owls are nocturnal creatures and not commonly photographed. Cats, on the other hand, are rather ubiquitous. The Humane Society estimates 36 percent of all U.S. households have a feline family member. Given their mischievous nature and expressive faces, cats became very popular for some fabulous Photoshopping. Silly cat pictures are called "LOLcats," combining the "LOL" (Laughing Out Loud) acronym with "cats."

The original "I Can Has Cheezburger?"

The madness seems to have started in early 2006 when a programmer named Eric Nakagawa posted a picture he'd found of a fat cat with a peculiar expression, with the caption "I can has cheezburger?" He found this funny, and so did readers of his blog. He began collecting more goofy cat pictures and eventually a site was born: Icanhascheezburger.com.

Goofy cats, it seems, are profitable. Icanhascheezburger.com now gets unique visitors in the "millions" each month and serves up "tens of millions" of pages. That's according to Ben Huh, the "chief cheezburger" of Pet Holdings, the firm responsible for the site. He declined to be more specific about Icanhascheezburger.com's traffic.

"Any time you get to the point where you have server bills to pay, you start to think of ways to pay for it," Huh said. "And when people appreciate what you do, you try to figure out how to make it a sustainable organization."

The site has a built in caption-creation tool, so it's possible to add your own captions to pictures. Visitors can submit cat images and caption the picture of their cat or others that are submitted. This goes on seven days a week, but every Saturday, FARK has its own bit of cat madness, dubbed "Caturday."

Inevitably there will be a cat-related article posted to FARK during the day. In an area where readers can comment on the story, people submit pictures with captions or even photos without captions, so others can take the images and make their own. The result is the same image sometimes being reused several times, but always to great effect.

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In a testament to the popularity of goofy cat pictures, even Google has gotten in on the action. Among the many gadgets in the iGoogle custom interface is Funny Cat Photos, an add-on that randomly displays, yes, pictures of cats with Icanhascheezburger/Caturday-like captions.

In such cases, the captions are rarely dirty but always hysterically funny. They also typically rely on a staggering variety of references, including Geico commercials, Harry Potter, the films The Silence of the Lambs and 300, and of course, parodies of the "I Can Has..." cat itself.

The captions for Caturday and Icanhascheezburger.com pictures are always written in an illiterate, misspelled manner to reflect the animals' lack of language skills. The best part is, there's no wrong way to do it. Reading them, though, is almost akin to learning another language. Between the misspellings, obscure references and uses of Internet legends, Caturday threads can leave you as confused as amused.

On the strength of the craze, Nakagawa is relocating from Hawaii to Seattle (I can has Starbucks? Nom nom nom.) as he, Huh, and a third full-time Pet Holdings employee try to make a business out of it.

Huh said he never thought the LOLcat craze would take off like it has. "It's surprising to us that it continues to grow, but it shows no sign of slowing down," he said.

One downside, however, is that with cat captions becoming a serious business venture, there's also the possibility of legal wrangling over ownership of the edited photos.

FARK's Curtis admitted he gets a little concerned about the issue, but said that so far, he hasn't received any letters on legal letterhead yet.

Meanwhile, Huh said his site gets occasional picture submissions without the permission of the original picture's owner, but there's been little in the way of squabbling.

"Ninety-nine percent of the time, people are amenable to using the picture," he said. "I think they understand this is a communal effort, almost like an art project at large."

As a result, the LOLcats remain something of a harmless pastime for their fans.

Curtis said Photoshop contests are often his most popular threads, so he enjoys the Caturday threads. "I take glee in beating a joke to death for so long that it's not funny any more, because if you do it long enough, it becomes funny again," he said. "They do this on 'South Park' all the time. It becomes funny again because it never left and eventually becomes a classic."

He figures, however, that eventually Caturday will run its course.

"The Internet demographic moves constantly," Curtis said. "It takes a few years, but when a new group of teenagers gets on the Internet, it gets impossible to explain an old joke to them. Try to explain 'All Your Base' to an 18-year-old. They will be like, 'That was funny at some point'?"

Updated to correct the fate of the O RLY? owl and add comments from John White.

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