Cheezburger Network
| Ben Huh | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | Seoul, South Korea |
| Residence | Seattle, Washington |
| Nationality | South Korean, American |
| Education | Cordova High School |
| Alma mater | Northwestern University |
| Occupation | CEO of Cheezburger |
| Website | Cheezburger.com |
Ben Huh is a South-Korean-American internet entrepreneur and the CEO of The Cheezburger Network, which at its peak in 2010 received 375 million views a month across its 50 sites.
Huh was born in Seoul, South Korea and grew up in Rancho Cordova, California, attending Cordova High School there. In 1999, Huh graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in journalism, although English was not his first language. With regards to this, he said “I got a degree in a language I didn’t speak because I felt something in the power of media that attracted me.”
The Web's influence on journalism was growing, and Huh decided to go into a career in the Internet. He founded a web analytics company, which folded after 18 months. After that, he worked at three companies in six years.
In 2007, Huh started a blog for fun with his wife about living with a dog in Seattle. Later that year, there was a series of pet food recalls, and the company responsible took down their company website. Huh went through the company’s cached files and found a PDF that outlined the company’s customers, revenues, and facility locations. He posted this to his blog, and the post got linked around the internet. One of the links was from a site called I Can Has Cheezburger and Huh struck up a friendship with the two owners.
In September 2007, Huh connected with a group of angel investors to buy I Can Has Cheezburger. At the time, the site was getting viewed 500,000 times daily, which Huh notes was “fantastic for a cat picture site that nobody understood.” He likes to joke that his investor pitch was “I would like to start a media company by buying a cat picture website. Can you give me $2.25 million?” Huh states that “we felt like that there was a pretty good possibility that we were buying into a cultural phenomenon, a shift in the way people perceived entertainment.”
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