Maybe Ben Huh really could solve all of Gourmet magazine's problems.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)The bittersweet jokes write themselves.
Ben Huh, the CEO of funny photo hub "I Can Has Cheezburger," who has been known to show up at black-tie events with a giant hamburger hat on his head, on Monday offered via Twitter to purchase Gourmet, the seven-decade-old, high-end cooking magazine that will be ceasing publication in November as part of budget cuts at parent company Conde Nast.
Huh was probably kidding. We think.
The recent ax job at Conde Nast, long a symbol of print media's most egregious of excesses and more recently the ultimate case of a postlapsarian publishing-industry crisis, received quite the reaction from the blogging and Twittering masses--a crowd that's notoriously easy to ignite with debate and banter over the death of print and future of the media. Along with Gourmet, the company announced the closing of titles Cookie, Modern Bride, and Elegant Bride on Monday.
Management consulting firm McKinsey had been enlisted earlier in the year to help Conde Nast handle its increasingly dire financial problems, so many people had been anticipating magazine closures (the fledgling business title Portfolio and home decor magazine Domino were silenced earlier this year).
But it was beloved industry mainstay Gourmet that really set off the blogosphere. Easy way to tell: the title became a "trending topic" on Twitter.
Media critic Rex Sorgatz offered his tongue-in-cheek take on the Conde Nast magazine shutterings.
(Credit: Twitter)Reactions ranged from "Is it strange that Gourmet folding feels like losing an old friend?" to "So. I'll never be Editor in Chief of Gourmet. Time to reassess my life goals" to "Wow. I guess I'll be eating more TV dinners now."
Twitter's ubiquitous celebrity users weighed in, too; pop singer Michelle Branch tweeted "First Domino and now Gourmet. What the hell!!?? Let's have a moment of silence."
It's sad to see such a long-lasting magazine disappear so quickly. But in the grand scheme of things, it's not surprising. Recipes are easy and convenient to put on the Web, not to mention searchable--and indeed, Gourmet recipes will live on at the Conde Nast-owned Epicurious.com. And food news has increasingly shifted to the Web with the growth of the food blogging craze, something that was exemplified in a snarky publicity stunt last week when restaurant industry blog Eater, which had just launched a "national" edition to go along with its regional sites, offered to pay any of the Web's "about 1,000,000 cutesy food blogs" $25 to shut down.
"Gourmet probably took the $25 to stop writing about food," one Twitter user quipped on Monday.
LONDON--On Thursday afternoon at the Future of Web Apps conference, I had to make a choice: Was I going to blog about a talk hosted by Six Apart engineer David Recordon, talking about the "open social Web," or a talk by Ben Huh, the "Chief Cheezburger" of goofy "lolcat" meme site ICanHasCheezburger.com?
Recordon's talk would invariably be an insightful look into issues like OpenID and OpenSocial, which have faded from the headlines in recent months but are still a hot topic in the developer community. But the talk could prove to be code-heavy given the fact that the average FOWA attendee is a seasoned developer. As for Huh, listening to someone talk about pictures of cats would seem a little bit silly given the broader issues we're all facing. But as conference organizers reminded the FOWA attendees earlier in the day, Huh has actually built a successful business with his network of geeky entertainment sites.
So I opted for the cheezburgers. We could all use some levity these days.
Indeed, Huh, who has admitted that he is allergic to cats, provided a shortened version of the wacky story about how he arrived at the helm of I Can Has Cheezburger--because he was sick of his job, was telling a friend via instant message that he loved I Can Has Cheezburger, and the friend in question said, "So why don't you buy it?" He then convinced investors early last year to give him the money to buy the site from creators Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami.
"That investment pitch sounds like nothing you've ever heard before," he said, but later said that the company has been "profitable since day one." They pull in 4 million page views per day, totaled 105 million views in the month of September, and make up a full 10 percent of blog host WordPress.com's traffic.
Huh's role at I Can Has Cheezburger, he explained, is running it like a smart and efficient business, which he says has allowed it to stay on top of things and not bleed through cash. His philosophy, rooted in the core principles of simplicity and obviousness, stands in pretty stark contrast to Web 2.0 outlets that have been all about APIs, platform strategies, widgets, Ajax, and what-have-you. Content syndication? Huh's idea of that is sticking a small I Can Has Cheezburger logo on all images uploaded to the site, providing an HTML embed code, and letting visitors do whatever they want with them.
Most important, he said, was building up community features to keep people coming back. Instead of catering to a small pack of rabid and hardcore users, he suggested working on the second and third tiers because they're much bigger. "Focus on the casual base, which is a really large percentage of users, who maybe visit once a week, once a month," he suggested to the developers in the audience. "You want to convert them so that they become fans. They grow your community."
He had a few more helpful hints: it's a worthwhile investment to buy the misspelled versions of your Web site name (you'd be amazed at how many people can't spell), but it's not a worthwhile investment to offer to pay contributors (the infrastructure is hell). Don't waste money building something in-house if it already exists for your use--i.e. commenting systems. Instead of paying for a slick design, pay to keep those servers up and running.
Above all, Huh told the FOWA audience to keep things simple, citing the "experiential difference" of Google beating Yahoo initially by just putting a search box on a mostly-blank page. "Technology people have a tendency to make simple problems incredibly complicated," he said--and that includes goals. I Can Has Cheezburger's goal is that "we want you to be happy for 5 minutes every day," he said. "That's a pretty low bar."
And I Can Has Cheezburger sister site FailBlog, he said, is really catching on in the face of financial turmoil.
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