Cheezburger cats swallow Know Your Meme

Cheezburger Network has acquired Know Your Meme – reportedly for a whole lot of cheese. What will the Cheezburger empire gobble up next?

And the Cheezburger empire continues to expand. According to Marc Hustvedt over at tech site Tubefilter, Cheezburger Network – the meme factory behind sites such as The Daily What, Fail Blog, and flagship I Can Has Cheezburger – has acquired Know Your Meme, a Web series which investigates various Internet trends. (If this all sounds like a lot of Cheez, check out this helpful explainer about the Golden Age of the Internet Meme.)

"There was a vacuum in our publishing portfolio," Cheezburger founder Ben Huh told CNN today. Huh did not discuss specifics, but Cheezburger Network is said to have forked over something in the area of low seven figures for Know Your Meme. That's a lot of cheezburgers.

"Before diving into the sale, I entertained another serious buy-out offer, entertained an offer for investment from a premier investor," Know Your Meme founder Andrew Baron wrote on his blog, "and even considered turning it into a 'double bottom line' company, but all in all, everyone advised and I agreed that this was by far the best deal to be done (esp. because I was 100% owner of the company with no other investors or partners involved)."

Baron said he cleared the idea with his staff, and "got everyone’s complete conviction." According to TechCrunch, all the members of the Knew Your Meme team – save Baron himself, who will remain at video blog site Rocketboom – will be moving to Cheezeburger HQ.

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