Eric Nakagawa, he of I Can Has Cheezburger? and lolcats, had some helpful suggestions on how to know when you have a website that has become a runaway cultural success:
People mail you with helpful suggestions about how to change the site.
People mail you death threats if you change the site.
Journalists who have never visited your website call you for an interview.
Journalists who have taken the effort to visit your website still want to call you for interviews.
You have to re-size every image so it cuts down on bandwidth.
You give up re-sizing every image because you’re getting 8,000 images a day.
You realize that people are downloading two terrabytes of funny pictures of kitteh.
Your ISP kicks you off before you’re killing their servers.
You can’t afford to grow the site because the hosting costs are bigger than your house rent, and you can’t afford both.
You get measurable traffic from Denmark.
You can give up your day job.
You’re making enough money to hire nine full-time staff to make funny pictures of kitteh.
This article appears in March 7 • 2008.
