Lolcat / I Can Has Cheezburger

Year First Appeared

2007

Creator

Eric Nakagawa, Kari Unebasami

I Can Has Cheezburger is a blog launched on January 11, 2007 that aggregates lolcat image macros, photographs of cats captioned with intentionally ungrammatical text (lolspeak). The site crystallized a meme that had been circulating in forums since the early 2000s into a mainstream cultural phenomenon.

Importance in Internet Culture

I Can Has Cheezburger transformed lolcats from dispersed forum humor into the first profitable internet meme, reaching 1.5 million daily hits at its peak. The site proved that user-generated, community-driven meme content could sustain a real business, prefiguring platforms like Reddit and TikTok. The lolcat meme also spawned LOLCODE (an esoteric programming language) and a lolspeak Bible translation project.

Interesting Fact

Eric Nakagawa started the site after a bad day at work, Kari Unebasami sent him captioned cat photos to cheer him up, and they recognized the format's appeal. Nakagawa nearly shut the site down due to overwhelming submissions before Ben Huh purchased it approximately four months after launch. Within months it was receiving 8, 000 submissions daily.