His kitty site became a caboodle

SAN FRANCISCO — When you LOL at silly pictures of cats with even sillier captions, Ben Huh laughs all the way to the bank.

For the uninitiated, that's Web shorthand for "laugh out loud," an abbreviation that is common in e-mails, instant messages and online chat rooms. Huh, a Seattle entrepreneur, has built a mini-empire on the unique brand of humor illustrated by the "LOLcats" craze: photos with captions punctuated by deliberately misspelled words and mangled phrases.

His network of eight websites, which includes I Can Has Cheezburger and I Has a Hot Dog, attracts 5 million users and 100 million page views a month. The newest, which launched last week, makes fun of celebrities. It's called ROFLrazzi, as in "rolling on the floor, laughing," and razzi, as in "paparazzi."

Huh, 30, is trying to expand his company, Pet Holdings Inc., in the face of a slowdown in online advertising. The Korean-born former journalist now has 12 employees who, along with his wife, Emily, help him run the websites.

"Twelve months ago we were this odd cat blog," Huh said. "I am not sure if we are on the cusp of a new type of entertainment or we are just a flash in the pan."

The LOLcats phenomenon began on a popular online bulletin board, 4chan. People started posting pictures of cats and slapping on captions from the feline point of view. The result was LOLspeak -- or "kitty pidgin," as blogger Anil Dash dubbed it -- a typo-twisted tongue that quickly jumped to other species and subjects.

Huh seized on the commercial potential. He paid an undisclosed sum to buy a popular LOLcats site named after a picture of a chubby gray cat gazing into the camera, with the caption "I can has cheezburger?" The site's founders, Hawaii-based Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, had started the site as a hobby and were overwhelmed by the response. (They are publishing a LOLcats book next month.)

Since buying I Can Has Cheezburger, Huh has added companion sites devoted to dogs, politics and really bad translations of English, among others. A fan favorite is Fail Blog, in which people take joy in others' mishaps.

The Pet Holdings websites have achieved cult status with a populist formula: Users with quick wits upload images bearing idiomatic expressions and idiosyncratic grammar, vote for favorites and post comments. The best of the thousands of submissions the sites receive each day hit the front pages.