Caturday and Lolcats

2005

Date: 2005 (Caturday on /b/) · 11 January 2007 (icanhascheezburger.com) · Place: 4chan /b/, then icanhascheezburger.com · Figures: anonymous /b/ posters · Eric Nakagawa, co-founder of I Can Has Cheezburger · Kari Unebasami, co-founder · Tags: Cats, LOLspeak 01. Saturday is for Cats Beginning around 2005, /b/ anons start posting cat pictures every Saturday and calling it Caturday. Pictures arrive captioned in the broken-English pidgin already developing across the chans: I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?, OH HAI, IM IN UR BASE KILLIN UR D00DS, MONORAIL CAT. The Impact-font caption hardens into the canonical image-macro form. The grammar is intentional: bad spelling, baby talk, third-person animal voice. Linguists later call it LOLspeak. 02. Eric and Kari Build a Business Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami in Hawaii repost a Caturday image (a British Shorthair captioned I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?) on a personal blog 11 January 2007 to cheer up a friend. The blog becomes icanhascheezburger.com, an entire site of crowdsourced lolcats. Cheezburger Inc. raises $30 million by 2011. Caturday is the moment the image macro becomes a literal industry. The grammar that /b/ built without commercial intent becomes the format of a venture-backed company. The chans, predictably, hate this. Sources • Eric Nakagawa interview, Time (2007) • KnowYourMeme, Lolcats / Caturday • Wired, 'I Has a Sweet Cheezburger Business' (2008)