It’s hard to believe, but this is my 100th posting on this blog. So to celebrate I thought I’d write about something very important: lolcats. In case you’re not familiar with the term, a lolcat is a (usually cute) picture of cats or kittens in strange poses / situations with a caption written in lolspeak – a sort of pidgin baby talk parodying internet slang. For the uninitiated, that description probably doesn’t explain much, so here’s a recent example that will probably make things clearer

The main forum for aficionados of lolcats (and loldogs) is icanhascheezburger.com, a blog that allows users to create and upload their own lolcat images. For the week ending May 17th, the site ranked 6th in our Humour category, and19th in Blogs and Personal Websites. Given that the latter category also includes blog directories and networks, its real blog ranking is actually higher; last week there were only 6 individual blogs that received more UK Internet visits that Cheezburger. Traffic to the site has increased 20-fold over the last 12 months.

The chart above illustrates the growth of the site over last few months, in contrast to the decline in market share experienced by b3ta.com. B3ta is a similar humour site that allows users to upload photshopped images based on a common weekly theme – for example, Celebrity Mutants or Extreme Gladiators. I pick these two sites to compare because B3ta was an early pioneer in this space – it has been going since 2001 – whereas Cheezburger is a relatively new entrant, having started only last year.
One reason for the difference in growth rates might be the type of audiences that each site attracts. Creating images for B3ta requires a certain amount of skill, and many of its contributors work in the design or IT sectors. Over half of its visitors are aged between 18 and 34, whereas Cheezburger has a higher proportion of older users, perhaps attracted by the simplicity of uploading images, as well as the fluffy kittens.
Interestingly, B3ta is based in the UK while Cheezburger is from the USA, and a similar story emerges when comparing another two similar sites, Popbitch (British) and Perez Hilton (American). Both sites specialize in bitchy and scandalous gossip, but again Popbitch’s market share is on the decline while Perez Hilton goes from strength to strength (it is now the most popular individual blog in the UK).

Anyway, I hope that you’ve enjoyed the blog and found it useful so far. There’s much more to come, but if there are any areas or topics that you’d like to see more of, please feel free to make some suggestions in the comments section below and we’ll try our best. Thanks for reading.