Hacker News Reader

Comment by inboulder | Hacker News Reader

"Cheezburger has been a profitable business since inception. We have been profitable every single quarter, and never had a quarter with negative cash flows. "

Oh come on now, how could you have negative cash flow? Your whole business model is based around publishing content on the web you didn't create, (and 99% of the time probably don't even own the rights to), this is not exactly an expensive business to run.

View on HN

Trust me, it's VERY easy to have negative cash flow, for any business

Sorry, don't get me wrong, I understand it's easy to burn through cash.

My point is: I'm not sure why Cheezburger thinks it's impressive to set up Wordpress blogs of other people's images without breaking the bank.

You don't think it's impressive? Go do it. I believe these guys are profitable with a headcount of 20-30 people (many of whom are content moderators). They've presumably built an ad-sales machine that works, a moderation machine that works, and build some fairly sophisticated custom software as well as the business analytics software behind it to measure/improve their sites. They've also built a "market testing" machine where they launch speculative blogs and measure their success/viability.

These guys have a GREAT growth curve and healthy margins- rare in the content world. Heck, look at Reddit. Great company, soaring page views, barely profitable.

I'm sure you're similarly unimpressed with Yelp? Threadless? Digg? Reddit?

I don't think you understand my point at all. The pageviews Cheezburger garner ARE impressive. That it is possible to run a business with very low capital costs (based on wordpress blogs) fairly inexpensively (and thus grow or _shrink_ organically) is NOT impressive.

I don't know if they're flouting it as "impressive" so much as "This is a fact that is not true for many other start ups."

>> Your whole business model is based around publishing content on the web you didn't create

You mean like Twitter? Facebook? Youtube?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com