When was 9gag invented

But by , it was clearly no longer a side project. Chan and the four other founders quit their jobs to work on it full time -- and to figure out how it could make money. It also began running ads on the site, which have become its biggest source of revenue. In , 9GAG hired its first employee. Today, the company has about 30 employees in Hong Kong and New York. The platform's biggest group of users is to year-olds, according to Chan, and most of its traffic comes from the United States.

Its competitors are "anything that can help people have fun and kill time," he said. BuzzFeed, another site that publishes user-generated content, has about million unique visits per month. While there is always "new and popular" content on 9GAG, Chan said one recent item that stands out for him is an optical illusion featuring a cat. Meld Close Icon. Magnifying Glass Icon. Sun Icon. Fiona Ren Tue Jul 24 Comments Close Icon. Comment Cancel. RC: When you look at social media, it always has ups and downs.

I think Instagram is definitely still very interesting. Stories and live videos are something our team keeps an eye on. If you talk about all the accounts, we are in the top 30 most-followed. If you take away celebrities, then we are number six.

Do you try to target Chinese users, despite that your main audience exists elsewhere? But Hong Kong is different from other parts of China. Most of them are backed by Chinese internet companies, and somehow we also see a trend in that a lot of U.

The Chinese apps like WeChat can do a lot more. We have million monthly active users, but a lot of these users are not in China. Most of our users are from the U. Our site has not yet launched in China.

But it looks like the second biggest video adoption market is China. YouTube is blocked, so we are all desperately seeking video content. How do you choose what to further distribute on your social channels? RC: All of our content is submitted by users. Sometimes they create their own content, which we encourage.

Sometimes they find content from other websites. But we always give credit back to the original creator. We rely heavily on our community to up-vote and down-vote the content, and we also look at the engagement of the post. For example, if you get a lot of comments and a lot of shares, and then we pick it, it will rise to a more popular page, which we call trending.

We have a small team of eight humans who pick what to share with everyone on social media platforms. We also measure video views. We want to help them, too, because we feel like they are under-resourced.

RC: For our website, the top countries are the U. Then France. The jokes shared by one person in one country are still funny to someone in a different country based not on their location but on their life experiences.