Cheezburger Network has just added a fresh $5 million to its coffers.

According to an SEC filing, the company issued securities in exchange for cash from Foundry Group, Madrona Venture Group, and Avalon Ventures. This infusion comes about a year after the company’s last deal, a splashy $30 million round late last year.

This round brings the company’s total funding raised to date to $37 million.

During the last round’s announcement, Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh (pictured) said he was still searching for his meme media empire’s larger significance (and revenue). While the dot-com economy, such as it existed, was built around e-commerce and news, and the social media economy was built around content creation, he thought a new era was about to dawn, “something bigger there that we want to be a part of. How do we get there? I don’t really have the answer. That’s why this money is important to us, to try to experiment, to try to understand the market.”

Since then, Cheezburger has taken a few interesting steps. Huh went on a warpath, talking about the importance of data over design. To allow for the creation and gathering of even more data, the network allowed users to start making their own Cheezburger-related sites and communities.

And to blow it up even more, mere days ago the company launched its API, which will help the massive network pull in and share more content than ever before.

“Before we made the API available, you could make a comic but then could only share with your direct network,” said Rick Simpkinson, a technical product manager at Cheezburger, in a VentureBeat interview. “Now by working with us, they can make Cheezeburger available as a publishing option.”

Ultimately, Huh and Co. have a huge scope and vision for the future of Cheezburger and its unique brand of democratically derived online content.

“As Cheezburger continues to innovate as a social humor platform, we’ll be pushing that innovation out through these apps and serving our customers the best funny content, wherever they are,” Simpkinson said.

Admit it, boys. You still get a little giddy thinking about that Princess Leia poster that adorned your bedroom wall as a teenager.

It has only been a few hours since the news was announced that Disney will buy Lucasfilm for $4 billion. Already, the Internet is blowing up with Lucas-Disney graphics and mash-ups. Fox News compiled a list of trending mashups.

– When You Wish Upon a Death Star.
– Finding Greedo.
– Song of the Sith.
– Lando and the Tramp.
– Snow White and the Seven Droids.
– The Princess Leia Diaries.
– Emperor Palpatine’s New Groove.
– The Wookiee.
– Beauty and the Boba Fett.
– Lilo & Sith.
– The Fox and the Han Solo.
– Droid Story.
– Jabba the Pooh.
– Bambi Wan Kenobi.
– Chitty Chitty Death Star.
– That’s So Vader.

So we went ahead and found some of the most popular graphics that are trending on meme-tastic sites like Cheezburger. Enjoy!

Top image via Cheezburger.com

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Message/image board forum 4Chan has reached a record 1 billion posts, the site’s official Twitter account stated Friday.

4Chan is often known as the birth place of memes, ridiculous inside jokes that people share on the Internet that most people probably attribute to Reddit these days. The site is credited with creating such historic memes as Rick Rolling and LoLcats. It started as a place for people to share manga and anime in 2003, but slowly evolved into an anything goes forum, with various channels that have their own rules of conduct. User posts are mostly anonymous, and the various community channels stay pretty active.

So, what was the billionth post? 4Chan said it isn’t sure, but suggested that people use their imagination.

The site is currently pulling in 22 million unique visitors per month and 620 million monthly page views, according to information 4Chan posted in early July. I think it’s safe to say that neither meme culture, nor 4Chan is going away anytime soon.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Continuing in its effort to fill the world with laughter, 9GAG rolled out a mobile app today that makes sharing its “wildly popular irreverent and hilariously funny content” easier than ever. Now, you can spread giggles as quickly as a text message. 9GAG also received $2.8 million in seed financing. Who said venture capitalists don’t have a sense of humor? Or maybe they just like companies with massive followings.

9GAG is a large online comedy community where users can discover and post content they find amusing and share it across social media networks. The platform generates millions of Facebook shares and likes a month and has over 850,000 Twitter followers. It is an extremely efficient way to make memes go viral, with 70 million global unique visitors and more than a billion page views a month. Apparently, the world is starved for laughter.

Aspiring comedians and comedy junkies can put their bit online in an environment far more forgiving than the harsh light of the open mic. Members can collect anything that tickles their fancy and share or comment as desired. Chances are, if you have seen absurd cat photos, cutting cartoons, or painful blooper videos online, 9GAG was somehow involved.

Now with the mobile app, people craving for a chuckle can access 9GAG’s content, photos, and videos from smart devices, download entertainment to peruse offline, and disseminate it. The app is currently available on iOS and will be available for Android later this year.

This initial investment was led by Freestyle Capital and True Ventures, with participation from First Round Capital, Greycroft Partners, returning investor 500 Startups, and notable angel investors like Kevin Rose, Tim Ferriss, and David Tisch. It will be used to help the company accommodate explosive growth and expand the team as well as the platform.

9GAG is based in San Francsico and Hong Kong.

If there are two things the Internet loves, and neither of those two things are allowed to be cats, they’re Bob Ross and autotuned remix vids. And PBS just served up the goods on both counts.

Bob Ross, longtime PBS host and painter of happy little trees, has joined the legendary Mr. Rogers in PBS’ ongoing series of remix videos featuring the icons of public television.

“Millions of fans remember Bob Ross and the joy he brought to so many aspiring artists over his years on television,” a PBS rep wrote this morning in an email to VentureBeat. “Like with Mr. Rogers, this is a great way to remember him.”

If you can watch that and not crack a smile, you might want to see a cardiologist, because you have no heart.

Ross, who passed away July 4, 1995, is already immortalized in tons of YouTube clips from his show, The Joy of Painting. While watching a guy with a crazy afro paint woodsy landscapes for a half hour at a time might seem like a one-way ticket to boredsville to the uninitiated, Ross’ trademark witticisms and gentle nature made the show a rare pleasure to watch. The show ran for more than a decade on PBS.

“I got a letter from somebody here a while back, and they said, ‘Bob, everything in your world seems to be happy,’” the icon once told his PBS audience.

“That’s for sure. That’s why I paint. It’s because I can create the kind of world that I want, and I can make this world as happy as I want it. Shoot, if you want bad stuff, watch the news.”

But Blizzard was not prepared. [UPDATE: And still is not.]

Players attempting to log into the game’s authentication server last night encountered an “Error 37″ message that locked them out of all portions of the title, including the single-player campaign. “Due to high concurrency, the login servers are currently at full capacity,” Blizzard explained on the official forums. “This may cause delays in the login process, account pages, and web services.” This, however, didn’t stop GamesBeat from “reviewing” the game.

Naturally, gamers are a little miffed and they decided to take out their frustrations on the Internet, creating a number of memes about the rough launch.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Black’s first video “Friday” amassed a staggering 167 million views on YouTube before the video was taken down from the Internet briefly about a month ago. Her fame and ridicule were powered by social media, with Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms helping create one of the most-watched YouTube videos ever.

When it comes to “My Moment,” YouTube viewers do not seem to be in a forgiving mood and have already given the video more than 65,000 dislikes vs. 38,000 likes at the time this article was published. No doubt both of those counts will rise quickly as the song tears across the Internet.

Like most YouTube videos, many of the user comments are profane and over-the-top. A sampling of some of the more civil comments gives insight to what some users are saying:

Disliked the video:

“Her ‘moment’ will not actually last long.” — datawraith3080.

“Sweet girl. Bad voice.” — Janefrigginlee

Liked the video:

“With this song, I bite my tongue. I couldn’t just stop laughing with her song “Friday.” It was completely ridiculous, but this song is SO MUCH BETTER.” — Monikita0193

“To be courteous, I will say that this song is much better than Friday. Honestly, that song was so annoying that I had mistaken it for a troll.” — TheEmcronin

To be clear, “Friday” sounded like a pop song made in a factory, and the accompanying music video looked like a distillation of other popular videos, even including a pointlessly perplexing verse from an unknown rapper. Even though “Friday” made its fame on being “the worst pop song ever” (an overstatement but not by much), it had strong sales on iTunes, and the high video count suggested quite a few repeat viewings. Perhaps the song had more fans than the Internet would suggest.

Black recently appeared in the popular video for singer Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night.” Black’s next move will be to release a 5-song EP in August, with “My Moment” as the lead single.

The full video for “My Moment” can be found below. What do you think?

Poole said he wanted to re-imagine the image board with his new venture-backed company Canv.as. He also said he expects many members of 4chan to move over to Canv.as once the site comes out of public beta, which should happen sometime in the next several months. But he does not want to force 4chan users to migrate over and doesn’t plan on technically duct taping the two sites together at any point.

4chan came out eight years ago and has since become a font of memes and new content that typically spreads across the Internet like wildfire. A lot of sites have tried to replicate the community energy that 4chan seems to have — Reddit included — but the 4chan magic just doesn’t seem to pop up anywhere else. Still, the Reddit community is able to get pretty close and does have a very tight-knit community — hence 4chan’s attempt to pull in users from Reddit.

4chan’s major drawing point is that any user can post anything anonymously, which leads to an enormous amount of content creation, but also to some issues regarding illegal content. The content isn’t curated and there are basically no rules, which is part of the appeal. That chaos, while off-putting to conventional publishers and advertisers, ends up breeding some of the most creative memes the Internet has to offer.

But the site is plagued with racist remarks and other distasteful content — sometimes even questionably legal content — as a result of the lack of curation. It takes a pretty brave soul to venture over to the main website, much less the site’s random board /b/ — where some of the best content on the Internet takes shape.

After browsing both Canv.as and 4chan for several months, I can see that there are lots of similarities between the two sites’ users. Most 4chan users are tech-savvy and know their way around image-editing programs like Photoshop. But Canv.as is trying to remove that technical barrier to entry by making it simple to edit images. It’s a natural evolution of the original purpose of 4chan — a place to remix content and promote free discussion. Anyone can then vote on the images with “stickers” — signaling a positive or a negative vote. And — most importantly — users can post the content anonymously, though they still have to log in to post content in the first place.

Poole said 4chan has reached 18 million monthly unique users, according to numbers from Google. 4 million monthly visitors in the U.S. and 8 million globally according to analytics measuring company Quantcast. The number of users registered by Google shot up because of a change in a tag, he said.

Poole’s project is worth watching closely, since a lot of sites have tried to replicate the same community energy that 4chan seems to have — for example, the comment streams in news aggregators like Reddit.com — but the 4chan magic just doesn’t seem to pop up anywhere else.

On first impression, I’m really impressed by Canvas It’s elegant and simple — users upload an image to begin a thread where anyone can reply. Commenters can remix the image using images from Google search, stamps or personal uploads. It’s a way to replicate the same kind of trainwreck commentary that generates some of the most famous images edited with Photoshop that then go on to circulate widely on the Internet. In short, Poole may have identified the secret formula behind viral meme generation — an insight that may well have mainstream marketers salivating.

4chan has 4 million monthly visitors in the U.S. and 8 million globally — many of whom are tech-savvy and know their way around image-editing programs like Photoshop. It looks like Canv.as is trying to remove that technical barrier to entry by making it simple to edit images.

On 4chan, the content isn’t curated and there are basically no rules, which is part of the appeal. That chaos, while offputting to conventional publishers and advertisers, ends up breeding some of the most creative memes the Internet has to offer. But the site is plagued with racist remarks and other distasteful content — sometimes even questionably legal content — as a result of the lack of curation. It takes a pretty brave soul to venture over to the main website, much less the site’s random board /b/ — where some of the best content on the Internet takes shape.

It’s nosecret that I’ve spent my fair share of time on similar online community sites. What I’ve learned by watching them is that it’s almost impossible to force a meme to take shape, and it’s completely unintentional most of the time. The only way to increase the chance of producing something popular on the Internet is to produce even more content — another appeal of 4chan, which boasts almost a million posts every day. It looks like Canv.as is designed to do just that, with gusto.

4chan is a tough sell for advertisers. Canv.as seems built to avoid attracting that kind of content and has a little bit more moderation than 4chan does. The question is whether Canv.as can bottle 4chan’s magic — and sell it.

So, Chris, can I get an invite?

[Photo: mohamedn]

Cheezburger’s flagship site was founded in 2007 as a place for users to post “LOLcats” — pictures of cats with funny text, like the image accompanying this post. Chief executive Ben Huh and his initial investors purchased the I Can Has Cheezburger site and founded the Cheezburger company in September of that year. The Seattle-based startup has been profitable since them, and it now attracts 16.5 million monthly visitors adding up to 375 million pageviews and 110 million video views.

Still, Huh said that without substantial funding, the company has had to think relatively small. The new money will allow Cheezburger to experiment and take more risks, he said. I asked if that means launching or buying more sites (after all, Huh offered to buy popular news aggregator Reddit last year) but he said he’s more interested in hiring engineers to improve the existing sites. For example, he said that it’s time to upgrade the LOLcat image building tool on I Can Has Cheezburger, because it hasn’t been improved in more than a year.

The funding was led by Foundry Group. Avalon Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, and SoftBank Capital also invested. $30 million seems like a lot of money for a blog network, but Huh said the investors aren’t pressuring him to hit a specific revenue target, rather they’re encouraging him to continue building the best company he can. Here’s how he explained his plan for building that company:

The first generation of the Web was about e-commerce and news, it was about information gathering. The second generation is more about expression, and it’s creation-driven. It was really the formation of Internet culture.

Now we see something bigger there that we want to be a part of. How do we get there? I don’t really have the answer. That’s why this money is important to us, to try to experiment, to try to understand the market.