It's likely at some point you have clicked on a 9Gag link on Facebook or Twitter revealing a crudely created hilarious piece of content. 9Gag is a daily blog of the best community created jokes and content. It's rare that we get to break out a startup of this caliber. Ray Chan Chin Ching is the founder of the exploding site and the group behind the inspiring StartupQuote blog. He and his small team based in Hong Kong, launched another product called Singboard through Dave McClure's 500 Startups last fall (watch TC video).
But their crown jewel is 9Gag is a daily joke site similar to FailBlog or icanhascheezburger where user submitted content gets posted to a blog multiple times throughout the day. It produces some of the funniest stuff you'll see on the web. What's more interesting is in the past 6-months the site has exploded in growth. 9Gag now has around 45MM monthly uniques! And as the notoriously sketchy Alexa points out, the above mentioned sites aren't even in the same league traffic wise.
But what if we compare it to something that's perhaps exploding in it's own right. Surely it couldn't measure up to the Pinterest drunken rage traffic. Turns out it holds its own. It's also one of the hottest Silicon Valley deals VC are trying to get their money bags on. You can imagine the ad revenue alone for a site with that type of traffic and such little overhead.
All from a pretty unassuming small team from Hong Kong that will likely move to Silicon Valley to grow the site. They're in town at the moment pitching 9Gag and trying to raise money to take it to the next level. They may be presenting at 500startups demo day on Thursday.
You can see that they've chugged along for a long time but broke out in the last quarter of 2011.