Who is 9gag

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. The user either sees the animal ascending or descending a set of stairs. The post has nearly 1, comments.

Chan said that he spent a lot of time discussing it with his friends and that "our conclusion was: 'We really have too much time. The Motley Fool Paid Partner. CNNMoney Sponsors. SmartAsset Paid Partner. These are your 3 financial advisors near you This site finds and compares 3 financial advisors in your area Check this off your list before retirement: talk to an advisor Answer these questions to find the right financial advisor for you Find CFPs in your area in 5 minutes.

NextAdvisor Paid Partner. 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. One example is that when students are graduating from college, they are focused on the same things no matter what country they are from.

They care about getting a job, family problems, and romantic relationships, too. College students relate to each other about exams and homework. They face similar challenges in their life, right? Experiences like these change your life, your view, and your sense of humor. TC: Humor is great escapism, but the internet is a resource for millennials to learn about politics, technology and current events, too.

Do you think that humor is more engaging than tragedy? LL: Both humor and tragedy are popular genres in entertainment. Humor needs a twist to build up the joke. Tragedy needs a context and plot, which requires a longer time to build up storytelling. We see humor as a lifestyle, embraced by our global audience.

TC: Humor is subjective, especially across a global audience like yours. Jokes can easily verge into racist and sexist territory. How do you determine when content is inappropriate or falls under the category of hate speech?

Humor is very personal. Some people have a very bad sense of humor.