Who is 9gag creator

Social media posts are curated by 9GAG's seven editors. Chan says that there was "no specific moment" when the site suddenly got big. But by , it was clearly no longer a side project. Chan and the four other founders quit their jobs to work on it full time -- and to figure out how it could make money.

It also began running ads on the site, which have become its biggest source of revenue. 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. But it looks like that worked out well for him — and the millions and millons of people who now regularly visit 9GAG but more on the statistics later. The 9GAG website typically features memes or rage comics submitted by netizens. It was created in when Facebook was not yet popular in Hong Kong. He is rather coy about the story behind the name though. At the time Ray spoke to Meld, 9GAG had more than 80 million unique visitors and two billion page views in the last 30 days.

Not too shabby for an Internet start-up that began as just a side project. 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. It also depends on their culture.

If you are from Germany, you may be more sensitive to Nazi jokes than a person from China is. Sensitive topics come up, but what we see is that our users completely understand that. They are really supportive and open towards other cultures.

TC: What would you do if someone created a meme making a joke about terrorism and it got a bunch of up-votes on 9GAG? RC: First of all, these are user created. So you will have content like hate speech and discriminatory posts slip through the system. Some of this content is stolen from other sites. But our active community reports that content. Building a healthy community is a never-ending battle.