cheezburger

Cheezburger is an American internet media brand and network known for humor blogs and meme culture, especially the LOLcats phenomenon. It originated with I Can Has Cheezburger?, a website launched in 2007 by Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unekel. The site invited users to submit images of cats paired with captions written in intentionally quirky or broken English, a format that became widely imitated across the early meme ecosystem. The platform helped popularize the image-macro meme and contributed to the broader adorable-animal humor trend online.

Following its initial success, the Cheezburger Network expanded to host a range of humor sites, including Fail Blog and Memebase, among others. The network fostered a large community of contributors and viewers, distributing user-generated content across multiple verticals such as photo captions, lists, and humorous takes on current events. The brand became known not only for Cats and memes but for shaping a broader culture of collaborative online humor in the late 2000s.

Cheezburger’s influence on meme culture is notable for mainstreaming image macros and the practice of captioning images with humorous, social, or ironic commentary. The network’s early model of community-driven content helped catalyze later meme platforms and user-generated content ecosystems on the web.

In the years since its rise, Cheezburger has undergone corporate changes and strategic restructurings. The brand remains associated with online humor and meme culture, continuing to publish content under the Cheezburger banner and sustaining a presence in the broader internet humor landscape.