In under a year, Ben Huh has become an unlikely web hero whose obtuse sense of humour has spawned a legion of cult websites fed for free by an army of loyal geek followers.
As the owner of Seattle-based internet company Pet Holdings, Huh has the enviable job of scouring the web in search of the latest internet fad - known as a "meme" - to nurture into an online phenomenon.
His first outing, ICanHasCheezBurger, acquired by the company in September last year, provides users with little more than a place to upload bizarre photos of cats captioned with even weirder misspelled punch lines.
The fad, dubbed "LOLcats", put Huh and his company on the map and now attracts 1.4 million page views a day.
Before Huh's site, LOLcats existed merely as images distributed by geeks on forums.
Huh's secret, he said in a phone interview, was to pull web fads out of the geek backwaters of the internet and make them accessible to a far broader audience.
In less than a year since he acquired ICanHasCheezBurger.com, Huh, 30, has followed up with five more similarly strange websites and, having recently hired his 11th employee, is now working on two more.
All up, the sites, funded by advertising, attract 2.8 million page views a day and if that trend continues for the rest of the year, Huh's sites will have served up over a billion views.
"We just want you to be able to come to one of our sites and be entertained for five minutes or more, that's all we're looking to do," he said.
Huh's latest venture, TotallyLooksLike, draws inspiration from the "separated at birth" features found in magazines.
However, instead of matching famous people with other famous people, TotallyLooksLike compares celebrity faces to pretty much anything - such as Gary Busey and a horse or Donatella Versace and Janice the Muppet.
And like all of the sites in Huh's stable, TotallyLooksLike is entirely user-driven with all content submitted to the site for free, allowing Huh and his team to concentrate on building out the technology back-end.
"We're like game designers - we're trying to come up with a system where people can have fun being creative," he said.
"People have always thought John Kerry looks like Herman Munster, that [Public Enemy's] Flavor Flav looks like Stripe from Gremlins. People have thought that and they probably shared it with friends but there was no outlet for it. We're giving these people an outlet to be funny."
Huh is the first to admit that he presides over a stable of sites that are, frankly, quite weird.
Failblog, which Huh recently acquired, specialises in hosting user-submitted pictures and videos of people or companies "failing at life".
For instance, featured on the site today is a picture of a ham advertised as being "delicious for [Jewish holiday] Chanukah".
And just below it is a picture of a screwdriver kit with the warning label "not to be inserted into penis".
GraphJam, another of Huh's sites, is a repository of Microsoft Excel graphs and flowcharts about everyday life and pop culture.
Punditkitchen hosts political pictures with funny captions, while there's even a version of LOLcats for dogs, called IHasAHotDog.
"I'll admit to you describing LOLcats in words sounds totally lame ... it's pictures of cats with funny misspelled captions on them," said Huh.
"If you think about that, you're like, why is that funny, there's no reason why that should be funny, but if you look at the site and you really understand the creativity of the users that come by, it's fascinating.
"Users transcribe human emotions to these cats and human activities, and for some reason it makes the cats adorable. It also makes them kind of evil ... the range is just incredible."
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