I Can Has Internet Millions

For the Web’s cognoscenti, the lolcats fad is so over. I Can Has Cheezburger, the site that sparked captioned-cat-picture mania, launched in January 2007. The online world’s early adopters learned about the phenomenon that February, when Boing Boing first linked to the site. Over the next few months, lolcats showed up in Gawker, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, and Time. Last October, Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, the site’s founders, published “I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Colleckshun,” a book that spent 13 weeks on the New York Times’ paperback best-seller list. Lolcats are now even showing up on hipster soda bottles. Is there anyone left in America who hasn’t had enough of these cat photos appended with ironic, allusive, peculiarly spelled captions?

Yes—lots of people. More than two years after its launch, I Can Has Cheezburger is still having cheeseburgers. Not only hasn’t it faded, the site is bigger than ever: People keep sending in new pictures, new people keep discovering the phenomenon, and every day traffic grows a bit more. In the last year, according to the traffic-monitoring firm Compete, visits to the site more than doubled.

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