A Funnyman With A Social Conscience: Why You Should Know Ben Huh!
As a person who has a sharp sense of humor, it is hard to get people to take you seriously. But when you are at the forefront of the Internet meme phenomenon, you have a real voice. That voice belongs to Ben Huh, who is the owner of I Can Has Cheezburger, the site that made lolcats popular. Even today, Huh is an outspoken humorist who carries a lot of business clout.
Ben Huh is Korean, but graduated from Northwestern University. Despite having a journalism degree, Huh was most fascinated by humor. Seeing humor as a universal concept, Huh studied Internet analytics and worked for several Internet companies before buying out I Can Has Cheezburger at the height of the lolcats phenomenon. Incorporating the site under Cheezburger, Inc. Huh pushed the envelope of Internet humor beyond lolcats and into the Internet meme phenomenon.
Now, Cheezburger, Inc. runs fifty sites that draw an average of 375,000,000 hits per month, making it the most successful sustained Internet humor venture yet. As the CEO of the company, Huh now wields more power than one might expect. He has a blog wherein he talks very seriously about all of the different aspects of his life, including blogging candidly on what it was like to lose thousands of dollars of other people’s money.
With the recent controversy over the Stop Online Piracy Act debate, Ben Huh weighed in powerfully. When the Internet registrar GoDaddy.com was associated with supporting SOPA, Ben Huh demanded the company explain itself. When the CEO of GoDaddy asserted that the company supported SOPA, Ben Huh decided to make the company pay for supporting a bill he saw as detrimental to Freedom of Speech on the Internet. Huh pulled all one thousand sites he and Cheezburger owned from GoDaddy, registering them instead with one of GoDaddy’s anti-SOPA rivals! That move not only cost GoDaddy money, but it served as a model for how other businesses could dissociate themselves from GoDaddy. The gambit was successful; GoDaddy got a new CEO and publicly went from supporting SOPA to claiming to be neutral on the bill!
Now, Ben Huh is devoting more of his time to The Moby Dick Project. This new venture takes Huh back to his journalism roots and away from the humor that made him a subculture icon. The Moby Dick Project seeks to unite journalists with a platform that will reignite legitimate journalism using the Internet. If Huh’s history is any indication, this is another venture of his that is bound for success!
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