9Gag – From A Meme Sharing Platform To A Money Making Machine

If you are on Facebook or Instagram, you are bound to come across 9Gag, a page which is a platform for sharing memes.  9Gag is one of the most popular pages on the internet owing to its diverse content and memes which are guaranteed to tickle your funny bone.  As the internet technology advanced, digital marketing became the next big thing giving rise to the era of online advertising.  Almost every site or platform runs ads these days in order to bring in an additional stream of revenue.  This has helped sites with no business models to earn some revenue and 9Gag is no expectation to this fad.  But 9Gag is not a small site anymore and the amount of daily users on its platform has made it into a money making machine.  Read further to find out how 9Gag became what it is today.

Beginnings:

9Gag was founded in the year of 2008 by Ray Chan, his brother Chris Chan, Derek Chan, Marco Fung, and Brian Yu who were studying in Hong Kong.  9Gag was started as a platform which was an alternative to emails on which users could easily share humorous photos or content.  The five founders pooled $1200 dollars to begin 9Gag as a side project to work on besides their day jobs.  9Gag was initially shared between the friends of the five founders but at the same time Facebook and Twitter were quickly gaining popularity.  Content from 9Gag slowly began making its way to Facebook and Twitter as users who found funny content on 9Gag began sharing it on social media platforms.  

Funding 

By 2012, 9Gag was no longer a side project but a full fledged site which was attracting a steady stream of users.  Ray Chan and the four founders quit their day jobs and decided to work on 9Gag full time.  It was also in 2012 that 9Gag launched its application on the Android and iOS platforms.  2012 was also the year when 9Gag received its first venture capital funding from the silicon valley.  The founders raised $ 2.8 million in funding from 22 investors.

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Target audience

9Gag is currently a platform which caters to three segments of target audience which makes up for its entire user base.  The first and major chunk of the target audience are the readers or browsers who come to the platform to look at content.  The second important target audience are the content creators.  Both readers and creators contributed to more than 3.5 billion page views per month in 2018 with a registered user base of 40 million.   The third and the minority group of target audience comprises of the advertisers.

Revenue streams

Today 9Gag has multiple sources of revenue but the two major sources are via its 9Gag Pro subscription and ads.  9Gag Pro is currently priced at Rs. 250 while the Pro+ is priced at Rs. 1150.  This price varies according to the geographical location of a user.   As of 2018, 9Gag was making $ 1.76 million per month via ads and $ 0.12 million via its pro membership.  However, today 9Gag has its own online marketplace where users can purchase 9Gag goodies which it sells in partnership with famous influencers.  9Gag also partners with cyber gaming studios to run ads on their platform as well as create exclusive content.  

9Gag is a perfect example of how a platform to share memes can generate revenue, thereby proving that in this day and age, any need can be converted into a business model.  In the case of 9Gag, it took the need of its user to look at funny content to pass time and made it into a successful cash cow.