You’ve seen them. The invisible bicycle cat. The invisible sandwich cat. The hilarious photos of silly cats and dogs paired with hilariously misspelled messages. Well, what you don’t know (or I hope you don’t know because if you already know all this that will make for a pretty boring read for you…) is that the I Can Has Cheezburger blog, which started out with a few silly photos has now morphed into a 53 site network, with all reader submitted content, averaging about 16 million uniques and around 7-figures in profits from books, tees, advertising, and licensing fees.

According to the NYTimes, “the company has published five books based on its blogs, one of which, a collection of the cats-with-misspelled-captions images known as Lolcats, hovered on the New York Times list of miscellaneous paperback best sellers for 13 weeks. Three more books are in production, along with a line of greeting cards and desktop calendars. The company says that each day it receives more than 18,000 submissions from readers.”

“One secret to the company’s success is the way it taps into the Internet zeitgeist. It seeks clues to what is funny right now by monitoring the Web for themes bubbling up on community forums, blogs and video sites. Then it spins off new sites devoted to the latest online humor fads.” “Cheezburger figures out what’s starting to get popular and then harvests the humor from the chaff,” said Kenyatta Cheese, one of the creators of a popular Web video series called “Know Your Meme” that documents viral online phenomena, known as memes. “Things like Lolcats and Fail are easy to make, easy to spread and hit on an emotional level that crosses a lot of traditional boundaries.”

It just goes to show with the right message, the right online marketing and little bit of ridiculous humor, you can engage with a completely surprising audience. I mean, my “I Hate Cilantro” Facebook group has 17K members.

Click here to read the whole story about the Cheezburger Network in Sunday’s New York Times online edition.