LOLCats Has The Last Laugh, Gets $30 Million Investment

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The layouts of the sites might not be the most technologically interactive, and their content is definitely not that thought provoking. But in the world of making pictures and posts viral, Pet Holdings Inc. has the art down. The parent and holding company for The Cheezburger Network – a conglomerate of sites including I Can Haz Cheeseburger?, Fail Blog and The Daily What – announced on The Cheezburger blog that they raised $30 million dollars in their first round of venture capital funding.

“The first generation of the Web was about e-commerce and news, it was about information gathering,” The Cheeseburger Network chief executive Ben Huh explained to Reuters.” The second generation is more about expression, and it’s creation-driven. It was really the formation of Internet culture. Now we see something bigger there that we want to be a part of. How do we get there? I don’t really have the answer. That’s why this money is important to us, to try to experiment, to try to understand the market.”

The Foundry Group, who helped back Zynga in their early days, together with Madrona Venture Group, Avalon Ventures, and SoftBank Capital have put in the money down. Huh claims there is no financial goal and the money’s main focus is to help the sites develop. The Cheezburger Network averages 16.5 million monthly visitors, has about 2 million Twitter followers and 1 million Facebook fans according to PC Mag. With this money, the company wrote that they will be improving the user experience, increasing postings and will be hiring more staff.

Extra money to spend means that links to the sites’ postings are going to become more prevalent and annoyingly hard to avoid, but it’s hard to blame corporate greed on teh cuteh kittez. Could you yell this face for trying to exploit cuteness for money?

More on TIME.com:

Nerd Meme du Jour: Inappropriate Golden Books

Possibly the World’s Last Trend Story on Lolcats

Lolcats Addendum: Where I Got the Story Wrong