LOLMSM! The Wall Street Journal has a news story about LOLcats and the popular I Can Has Cheezburger? website. The article details Eric Nakagawa's success with the icanhascheezburger.com website and lists some of the numerous LOLcats spinoffs. So, technically it does qualify as a business article even though they put it in a column called "Time Waster."
Mr. Nakagawa's simple Web site has become the center of the "LOLcats" phenomenon, a booming online subculture built around digital images and deliberately bad grammar. There's not much to it: Take a digital photo -- often one of household pets, particularly cats -- and purposefully place misspelled text on top. Anyone with elementary skills in Adobe's Photoshop or Microsoft's Paint software can make their own.
Nearly nine months after launching icanhascheezburger.com, Mr. Nakagawa's site receives around 200,000 unique visitors and a half-million page views each day, according to Mr. Nakagawa.
Visitors can browse a sprawling gallery of lolcats, vote for their favorites and post comments. Mr. Nakagawa says he receives up to 500 submissions a day, thanks in no small part to his site's tool that helps people build their own. He says every entry is screened for merit and originality before earning inclusion.
Only 12 or so submissions make the gallery a day. "It's ridiculous," Mr. Nakagawa admits, "but we do go through all of them." He certainly has the time. Revenue from ads on the site is "more than enough to pay my bills."
We blogged about the site's growing traffic and income in an earlier post. The Wall Street Journal Lolcats story is interesting and it also has some good resources and links. The best thing about it was that they posted it on Caturday.
So what's next for the Wall Street Journal - the major business newspaper turned pop culture and web humor rag? A front page story on Charlie the Unicorn? A detailed analysis of the dramatic chipmunk? An LOLbiz section? Time will tell.
Some other blogs covering the Wall Street Journal's coverage of the lolcats can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. There is also a thread here on Techmeme.
LOLMSM! The Wall Street Journal has a 
