I'm a little surprised that no one's caught on to the real business model behind Cheezburger Network.
What they're doing is pretty clever. It's more than just a bunch of silly captions under photos of cats. They're building a system that capitalizes on Internet memes that can be presented in a blog-like fashion.[1]
That, to me, is a mark of a potentially sustainable business model. To break it down in more detail:
a) They monitor Internet memes
b) They evaluate which ones are worthy of a trial run
c) They launch a site around it
d) They assess that site's success (using whatever metrics they've discovered are important, such as PVs and unique visitors for advertisers)
e) They pull the plug if the trial is not successful
It's not a new business model, but it's a clever one that's obviously working. I'm particularly impressed that they're aiming to launch a site every week, and kill only 20% of those experiments. I wonder if that number is low.
That's why they're more than just a WordPress blog with cats on it.
[1] The similarities to a blog are probably incidental. I imagine they basically want a way to display recent user-generated entries and allow other users to comment on them. A blogging system naturally satisfies these attributes. Otherwise, I don't think they necessarily need their sites to look like blogs, per se.
What they're doing is pretty clever. It's more than just a bunch of silly captions under photos of cats. They're building a system that capitalizes on Internet memes that can be presented in a blog-like fashion.[1]
That, to me, is a mark of a potentially sustainable business model. To break it down in more detail:
a) They monitor Internet memes
b) They evaluate which ones are worthy of a trial run
c) They launch a site around it
d) They assess that site's success (using whatever metrics they've discovered are important, such as PVs and unique visitors for advertisers)
e) They pull the plug if the trial is not successful
It's not a new business model, but it's a clever one that's obviously working. I'm particularly impressed that they're aiming to launch a site every week, and kill only 20% of those experiments. I wonder if that number is low.
That's why they're more than just a WordPress blog with cats on it.
[1] The similarities to a blog are probably incidental. I imagine they basically want a way to display recent user-generated entries and allow other users to comment on them. A blogging system naturally satisfies these attributes. Otherwise, I don't think they necessarily need their sites to look like blogs, per se.