Hi Burgers,

On Monday, July 30, half of our community will automatically land on the new Cheezburger site. Instead of clicking to opt-in from the old Cheezburger version, half of you will be redirected to the new Cheezburger. You will still have the option to opt-out, but we do hope you’ll tell us why either here in the comments or by sending us an email.

Redirecting more people over to check out the new Cheezburger will give us the opportunity to hear more feedback about your experience and how well the sites perform for you.

In our blog post, Cheezburger Comments are Here!, we informed you about CheezTech working on the performance issues you reported. We discovered that these issues are related to a technical issue surrounding the infinite scroll feature. In order for us to fix these performance issues, we have to turn off infinite scroll for now. We may keep it off or we may provide an option for you to turn it on or off. We’ll keep you updated as we continue to research these issues. We know that so many of you love this feature, so we apologize for the inconvenience!

Sincerely,

Emily, Will and Heather (Tofu, dollydally81 and poppylady)
Cheezburger Community Team

The Daily Beast recently named Ben Huh as a Top 10 Virologist in their Digital Power Index, a round-up of the people “shaping and changing the world” online. Congratulations, Ben!

We believe that a free and open Internet can bring about a better world. To keep the Internet free and open, we call on communities, industries, and countries to recognize these principles. We believe that they will help to bring about more creativity, more innovation, and more open societies.

We are joining an international movement to defend our freedoms because we believe that they are worth fighting for.

Cheezburger has signed on and worked to create this declaration, so we encourage you to help us discuss these principles on The Daily What — agree or disagree with them, debate them, translate them, make them your own, and broaden the discussion with your community — as only the Internet can make possible.

We will not be moderating comments here, so please visit this post on The Daily What to join the conversation!

Hey there Burgers!

We are excited to formally announce that we have launched Cheezburger Comments! When you are signed into your Cheezburger account, your username will automatically post with your comment. If you want to comment using a different username, you will have to sign out of your Cheezburger account, or open a different browser for the time being (we are checking to see if you can comment anonymously while signed into your Cheezburger account). Cheezburger Comments are available in addition to Facebook comments. We are still testing different layout options based on community input.

We’re very appreciative of all the thoughtful feedback you’ve been sending us about the new Cheezburger! Thank you for taking the time to participate in the conversation. Here is some helpful information based on the feedback we’ve been hearing:

We will be introducing new design elements to the content layout such as moving the title to the top of the post, modifying the comment and flag buttons and making the text font easier to read.

Some changes to navigation are being tested and designed based on your feedback.

The Search feature is coming back! We have temporarily removed it so that Dr. Tiny Cat can make it more functional for you to use!

CheezTech is working on improving performance. We know that for some of you the site loads slowly, and we will get this fixed soon.

If you experience any usability issues, please send us an email at contactus@cheezburger.com and please let us know what browser and version you use. We are happy to help you out!

Sincerely,

Emily, Will and Heather (Tofu, dollydally81 and poppylady)
Cheezburger Community Team

Hi Burgers!

Since we launched the new Cheezburger, we have provided everyone with the opportunity to opt-in and try it out. This has given us some really great feedback, but we want more!

On Tuesday, June 26, some of you will automatically land on the new Cheezburger site. This means that instead of clicking to opt-in, some of you will be redirected to the new Cheezburger. You will still have the option to opt-out, but we do hope you’ll tell us why. We are doing this so we can get even more people over to check out the new Cheezburger. This will give us the opportunity to hear more feedback about your experience!

We would love to hear what you think about this or answer any questions! Please feel free to post a comment here or email us directly at contactus@cheezburger.com.

Sincerely,

Emily, Will and Heather (Tofu, dollydally81 and poppylady)
Cheezburger Community Team

Peanut butter and jelly. Poptart cats and rainbows. Memes and advertising.

A recent Businessweek.com article focuses on the growing trend of brands like Nike, Nokia, Lipton, Vitamin Warer and others using Internet memes as part of their advertising. Why?

“Memes are a tremendous asset for brands because, like celebrities, they have an audience that recognizes and appreciates them.”

The familiar banners that have been vehicles for brand messaging in years past are now just one piece of the online advertising puzzle. It’s not always enough to just see a picture or animation of a product you might be interested in: consumers are also looking to connect with a brand by directly engaging them and creating and remixing their content.

The key will be staying true to your brand voice and your consumers and not trying to take it too far.
- HuffPo: Banners Are Here to Stay

Cheezburger’s popular meme and humor platform is a proven method for promoting brands via native advertising. Because our users visit daily to create and remix memes and share their sense of humor with others, Cheezburger is a perfect place for them to also creatively engage with a brand’s identity.

Brands like Toyota Yaris and Kraft come to us for our experience with memes:

Sometimes our campaigns win awards:

Simply put: our knowledge of memes and our clever, funny audience (the most engaged of any humor publisher) make us the best place to promote your brand.

“You as the person who created something are not the most valuable person on the chain,” says Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger. … “The MVPs are the people who change it, appropriate it, and turn it into something greater.”

Hi Burgers!

We are pleased to inform you that the “See All Captions” feature is back! This feature will let you view all of the captions made from the same picture. Many of you told us how important this is for your creative process, and that this feature helps ensure that repeat captions are not submitted. We appreciate your patience while it was temporarily away. The “See All Captions” button will appear on the Single Post Page below the “Recaption” button and it will only appear on pictures that have been recaptioned! Check out this post on the Cheezburger Community Support site for a visual.

We would love to hear what you think about this or answer any questions! Please feel free to post a comment here or email us directly at contactus@cheezburger.com.

Sincerely,

Emily, Will and Heather (Tofu, dollydally81 and poppylady)
Cheezburger Community Team

2012 Hollywood Fringe Festival
June 10, 17 & 24 @ HUDSON THEATRE | click here for tickets!

LOLPERA is back! If you missed the first sold-out showing of the only epic opera about the Internets (or liked it so much you’re ready for MOAR), we’ve got some great news. Three performances of LOLPERA will be presented as part of the Hollywood Fringe Festival this month and we really, really think you should go.

LA Weekly’s “Pick of the Week,” LOLPERA is a “giddily absurd” opera with a score referencing everything from Gilbert and Sullivan to 80’s power ballads. The libretto is assembled entirely from the internet’s “biggest inside joke”: the multi-user-generated captions and images of the LOLCAT meme.

Check out this video of last year’s performance, buy your tickets, and tell them Cheezburger says O HAI:

We need your feedback, Burgers!

We are currently testing out a voting system for the new Cheezburger. As we evaluate the results, we’d like to hear what makes you happy when it comes to casting your vote.

This new voting system that has launched on the beta allows you to score the content by clicking a “thumbs down” or a “thumbs up” button. We are trying this system because the majority of “burgers” that were clicked on the old voting system was either 1 burger or 5 burgers–which translates to thumbs down or thumbs up. Let us know what you think!

We haven’t implemented a more in depth and permanent voting method yet because we want to make sure it’s a feature that you will use, and most importantly one that will make you happy.

We’d love to hear what you think! What is important to you when it comes to voting? What information do you like to see as a result of voting? Please feel free to post a comment here or email us directly at contactus@cheezburger.com.

Sincerely,

Emily, Will and Heather (Tofu, dollydally81 and poppylady)
Cheezburger Community Team

Hi Burgers!

The new Cheezburger is testing out a different method for you to navigate through featured content! Infinite scroll is now available on all Cheezburger beta sites viewed from Firefox, Safari, and Chrome desktop browsers.

Infinite scroll allows you to view as much content as you’d like without having to click a “previous” or “next” button at the bottom of each page. Now, rather than having to move your mouse to click a button, more content automatically loads as you scroll your way down the page — making it easier for you to engage with the content.

We are excited to test out this new navigational feature, and we’d love to hear what you think! Please feel free to post a comment here or email us directly at contactus@cheezburger.com.

Sincerely,

Emily, Will and Heather (Tofu, dollydally81 and poppylady)
Cheezburger Community Team