FAIL Blog
A photo of a crooked staircase, a sign with a misspelled word, a skateboarder meeting a handrail, each stamped with one word: FAIL. Launched in January 2008 and bought by the lolcats company that spring, FAIL Blog turned a one-word caption into a noun the whole internet used.
FAIL Blog launched in January 2008 with the simplest format on the web: a photo or short video of something going wrong, captioned "FAIL," "epic fail," or "[activity]: you're doin' it wrong." Within months it caught the eye of Ben Huh, the journalist-turned-entrepreneur whose Pet Holdings had bought I Can Has Cheezburger? in 2007, and Huh bought FAIL Blog from its founder that April. It went from nothing to 10 million page views a month in about 90 days and spun off siblings: Failbook for Facebook screenshots, There, I Fixed It for jury-rigged repairs, Ugliest Tattoos.
Then the economy cooperated. Huh liked to say the site "really started to take off when the financial industry decided to — ahem — fail," and at a Senate hearing in September 2008 a demonstrator held a "FAIL" sign up behind Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. The word escaped the site: Time credited FAIL Blog with helping make "fail" a noun and an exclamation, The Huffington Post would later call Netflix "a walking failblog" over its 2011 price hike, and by January 2010 the site had 1.1 million unique visitors a month. It won two People's Voice Webby Awards in 2009, in Humor and in Weird, and the same year drew a legal threat from Guinness World Records after posting a screenshot of the record page for "Most Individuals Killed in a Terrorist Attack," complete with its "Break this record" link.
By October 2009 Huh's network was nearly thirty sites with 26 employees, a billion page views every four months, and a book business worth nearly a third of its revenue. Cheezburger was sold to the Israeli company Literally Media in April 2016, and by the end of that year FAIL Blog had quietly stopped being a fail blog: today it runs reddit-sourced stories about bad bosses, entitled customers and homeowner-association feuds under the old name. The one-word caption outlived the site that popularized it.
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